•3pt>4«SSSrti ■ M ^^H%\=tf ';■■■• Class __ID_2J_ Book_ )l^ Qsm^kW COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. THE STORY OF MANKIND By HENDRIK VAN LOON, AB. Ph.D. Professor of the Social Sciences in Antioch College. Author of The Fall of the Dutch Republic, The Rise of the Dutch Kingdom, The Golden Book of the Dutch Navigators, A Short Story of Discovery, Ancient Man. This book is fully illustrated with eight three-color pages, over one hundred black and white pictures and numerous animated maps and half-tones drawn by the author. ^\\\ Mrf'^^ r.; . 325 108. In the Cabin of the Mayflower , , 327 109. The French Explore the West .....>. . 328 110. The First Winter in New England 329 111. George Washington 331 112. The Great American Revolution 332 113. The Guillotine 337 114. Louis XVI . S39 115. The Bastille . 342 11 6. The French Revolution Invades Holland ....<> 347 117. The Retreat from Moscow ;. . 355 118. The Battle of Waterloo 358 119. Napoleon Goes Into Exile 359 120. The Spectre Which Frightened the Holy Alliance . . .864 121. The Real Congress of Vienna 367 122. The Monroe Doctrine . ;. .385 123. Giuseppe Mazzini ..,.....>.. 395 124. The First Steamboat . . ,., ...... 407 125. The Origin of the Steamboat ........ 408 126. The Origin of the Automobile . . ...... ,. 409 127. Man-power and Machine-power . . > . . •. .414 128. The Factory ............ 4l6 129. The Philosopher .... > ,.. ,., . . . 427 130. Galileo ............... 429 131. Gothic Architecture . i. i. 437 xxviii LIST OF PICTURES AND ANIMATED MAPS PAGE 132. The Troubadour 442 133. The Pioneer 447 134. The Conquest of the West ,. . . 451 135. War :. . . 457 136. The Spread of the Imperial Idea 460 137. The End :.,>... 467 THE STORY OF MANKIND High up in the North in the land called Svithjod, there stands a rock. It is a hundred miles high and a hundred miles wide. Once every thousand years a little bird comes to this rock to sharpen its beak. When the rock has thus been worn away, then a single day of eternity will have gone by. THE SETTING OF THE STAGE We live under the shadow of a gigantic question mark. Who are we? Where do we come from? Whither are we bound? Slowly, but with persistent courage, we have been pushing this question mark further and further towards that distant line, beyond the horizon, where we hope to find our answer. We have not gone very far. We still know very little but we have reached the point where (with a fair degree of accuracy) we can guess at many things. In this chapter I shall tell you how (according to our best belief) the stage was set for the first appearance of man. If we represent the time during which it has been possible for animal life to exist upon our planet by a line of this length. then the tiny line just below indicates the age during which man (or a creature more or less resembling man) has lived upon this earth. Man was the last to come but the first to use his brain for the purpose of conquering the forces of nature. That is the reason why we are going to study him, rather than cats or dogs or horses or any of the other animals, who, all in their own way, have a very interesting historical development behind them. % THE STORY OF MANKIND IT RAINED INCESSANTLY In the beginning, the planet upon which we live was (as far as we now know) a large ball of flaming matter, a tiny cloud of smoke in the endless ocean of space. Gradually, in the course of millions of years, the surface burned itself out, and was cov- ered with a thin layer of rocks. Upon these lifeless rocks the rain descended in endless tor- rents, wearing out the hard granite and carrying the dust to the valleys that lay hidden be- tween the high cliffs of the steaming earth. Finally the hour came when the sun broke through the clouds and saw how this little planet was covered with a few small puddles which were to develop into the mighty oceans of the eastern and western hemispheres. Then one day the great wonder happened. What had been dead, gave birth to life. The first living cell floated upon the waters of the sea. For millions of years it drifted aimlessly with the currents. But during all that time it was developing certain habits that it might survive more easily upon the inhospitable earth. Some of these cells were happiest in the dark depths of the lakes and the pools. They took root in the slimy sediments which had been carried down from the tops of the hills and they became plants. Others preferred to move about and they grew strange jointed legs, like scorpions and began to crawl along the bottom of the sea amidst the plants and the pale green things that looked like jelly-fishes. Still others (covered with scales) depended upon a swimming motion to go from place to place in their search for food, and gradually they populated the ocean with myriads of fishes. Meanwhile the plants had increased in number and they had to search for new dwelling places. There was no more room THE SETTING OF THE STAGE 6 for them at the bottom of the sea. Reluctantly they left the water and made a new home in the marshes and on the mud- banks that lay at the foot of the mountains. Twice a day the tides of the ocean covered them with their brine. For the rest of the time, the plants made the best of their uncomfortable situation and tried to survive in the thin air which surrounded the surface of the planet. After centuries of training, they learned how to live as comfortably in the air as they had done in the water. They increased in size and became shrubs and trees and at last they learned how to grow lovely flowers which attracted the attention of the busy big bumble-bees and the ^^ 5ToaY OF THE ASCENT OF MAN THE STORY OF MANKIND THE PLANTS LEAVE THE SEA birds who carried the seeds far and wide until the whole earth had become covered with green pastures, or lay dark under the shadow of the big trees. But some of the fishes too had begun to leave the sea, and they had learned how to breathe with lungs as well as with gills. We call such creatures amphibi- ous, which means that they are able to live with equal ease on the land and in the water. The first frog who crosses your path can tell you all about the pleasures of the double existence of the amphibian. Once outside of the water, these animals gradually adapted themselves more and more to life on land. Some became rep- tiles (creatures who crawl like lizards) and they shared the silence of the forests with the insects. That they might move faster through the soft soil, they improved upon their legs and their size increased until the world was populated with gigantic forms (which the hand-books of biology list under the names of Ichthyosaurus and Megalosaui'us and Bron- tosaurus) who grew to be thirty to forty feet long and who could have played with elephants as a full grown cat plays with her kittens. Some of the members of this reptilian family began to live in the tops of the trees, which were then often more than a hundred feet high. They no longer needed their legs for the purpose of walking, but it was necessary for them to move quickly from branch to branch. And so they changed a part of their skin into a sort of parachute, which stretched between the sides of their bodies and the small toes of their fore-feet, and gradually they covered this skinny parachute with feathers and made their tails into a steering gear and flew from tree to tree and developed into true birds. THE SETTING OF THE STAGE 7 Then a strange thing happened. All the gigantic reptiles died within a short time. We do not know the reason. Per- haps it was due to a sudden change in climate. Perhaps they had grown so large that they could neither swim nor walk nor crawl, and they starved to death within sight but not within reach of the big ferns and trees. Whatever the cause, the million year old world-empire of the big reptiles was over. The world now began to be occupied by very different creatures. They were the descendants of the reptiles but they were quite unlike these because they fed their young from the "mammae" or the breasts of the mother. Wherefore modern science calls these animals "mammals." They had shed the scales of the fish. They did not adopt the feathers of the bird, but they covered their bodies with hair. The mammals how- ever developed other habits which gave their race a great ad- vantage over the other animals. The female of the species carried the eggs of the young inside her body until they were hatched and while all other living beings, up to that time, had left their children exposed to the dangers of cold and heat, and the attacks of wild beasts, the mammals kept their young with them for a long time and sheltered them while they were still too weak to fight their enemies. In this way the young mammals were given a much better chance to survive, because they learned many things from their mothers, as you will know if you have ever watched a cat teaching her kittens to take care of themselves and how to wash their faces and how to catch mice. But of these mammals I need not tell you much for you know them well. They surround you on all sides. They are your daily companions in the streets and in your home, and you can see your less familiar cousins behind the bars of the zo- ological garden. And now we come to the parting of the ways when man suddenly leaves the endless procession of dumbly living and dying creatures and begins to use his reason to shape the destiny of his race. One mammal in particular seemed to surpass all others in 8 THE STORY OF MANKIND its ability to find food and shelter. It had learned to use its fore-feet for the purpose of holding its prey, and by dint of practice it had developed a hand-like claw. After innumer- able attempts it had learned how to balance the whole of the body upon the hind legs. ( This is a difficult act, which every child has to learn anew although the human race has been doing it for over a million years.) This creature, half ape and half monkey but superior to both, became the most successful hunter and could make a living in every cHme. For greater safety, it usually moved about in groups. It learned how to make strange grunts to warn its young of approaching danger and after many hun- dreds of thousands of years it began to use these throaty noises for the purpose of talking. This creature, though you may hardly believe it, was your first "man-like" ancestor. OUR EARLIEST ANCESTORS We know very little about the first "true" men. We have never seen their pictures. In the deepest layer of clay of an ancient soil we have sometimes found pieces of their bones. These lay buried amidst the broken skeletons of other animals that have long since disappeared from the face of the earth. Anthropologists (learned scientists who devote their lives to the study of man as a member of the animal kingdom) have taken these bones and they have been able to reconstruct our earliest ancestors with a fair degree of accuracy. THE GROWTH OF THE HUMAN SKULL The great-great-grandfather of the human race was a very ugly and unattractive mammal. He was quite small, much 9 10 THE STORY OF MANKIND smaller than the people of today. The heat of the sun and the biting wind of the cold winter had coloured his skin a dark brown. His head and most of his body, his arms and legs too, were covered with long, coarse hair. He had very thin but strong fingers which made his hands look like those of a mon- key. His forehead was low and his jaw was like the jaw of a wild animal which uses its teeth both as fork and knife. He wore no clothes. He had seen no fire except the flames of the rumbling volcanoes which filled the earth with their smoke and their lava. He lived in the damp blackness of vast forests, as the pygmies of Africa do to this very day. When he felt the pangs of hunger he ate raw leaves and the roots of plants or he took the eggs away from an angry bird and fed them to his own young. Once in a while, after a long and patient chase, he would catch a sparrow or a small wild dog or perhaps a rabbit. These he would eat raw for he had never discovered that food tasted better when it was cooked. During the hours of day, this primitive human being prowled about looking for things to eat. When night descended upon the earth, he hid his wife and his children in a hollow tree or behind some heavy boulders, for he was surrounded on all sides by ferocious animals and when it was dark these animals began to prowl about, looking for something to eat for their mates and their own young, and they liked the taste of human beings. It was a world where you must either eat or be eaten, and life was very unhappy because it was full of fear and misery. In summer, man was exposed to the scorching rays of the sun, and during the winter his children would freeze to death in his arms. When such a creature hurt itself, (and hunting animals are forever breaking their bones or spraining their ankles) he had no one to take care of him and he must die a horrible death. Like many of the animals who fill the Zoo with their strange noises, early man liked to jabber. That is to say, he endlessly repeated the same unintelligible gibberish because it OUR EARLIEST ANCESTORS 11 Hfttany ABbuT 6000 Tllg WRiTTba) Recoeo OP Hl4ToB Y \4«t|( ^^^jSuu\its>.S^>>:S ^^^^i^.mm^'^^TJt^^ «,T PREHISTORY AND HISTORY 12 THE STORY OF MANKIND pleased him to hear the sound of his voice. In due time he learned that he could use this guttural noise to warn his fellow beings whenever danger threatened and he gave certain little shrieks which came to mean "there is a tiger!" or "here come five elephants." Then the others grunted something back at him and their growl meant, "I see them," or "let us run away and hide." And this was probably the origin of all language. But, as I have said before, of these beginnings we know so very little. Early man had no tools and he built himself no houses. He lived and died and left no trace of his exist- ence except a few collar-bones and a few pieces of his skull. These tell us that many thousands of years ago the world was inhabited by certain mammals who were quite different from all the other animals — who had probably developed from an- other unknown ape-like animal which had learned to walk on its hind-legs and use its fore-paws as hands — and who were most probably connected with the creatures who happen to be our own immediate ancestors. It is little enough we know and the rest is darkness. PREHISTORIC MAN PREHISTORIC MAN BEGINS TO MAKE THINGS FOR HIMSELF Early man did not know what time meant. He kept no records of birthdays or wedding anniversaries or the hour of death. He had no idea of days or weeks or even years. But in a general way he kept track of the seasons for he had noticed that the cold winter was invariably followed by the mild spring — ^that spring grew into the hot summer when fruits ripened and the wild ears of corn were ready to be eaten and that summer ended when sudden gusts of wind swept the leaves from the trees and a number of animals were getting ready for the long hibernal sleep. But now, something unusual and rather frightening had happened. Something was the matter with the weather. The warm days of summer had come very late. The fruits had not ripened. The tops of the mountains which used to be cov- ered with grass now lay deeply hidden underneath a heavy burden of snow. Then, one morning, a number of wild people, different from the other creatures who lived in that neighbourhood, came wandering down from the region of the high peaks. They looked lean and appeared to be starving. They uttered sounds which no one could understand. They seemed to say that they were hungry. There was not food enough for both the old inhabitants and the newcomers. When they tried to stay 13 14 THE STORY OF MANKIND more than a few days there was a terrible battle with claw-like hands and feet and whole families were killed. The others fled back to their mountain slopes and died in the next blizzard. But the people in the forest were greatly frightened. All the time the days grew shorter and the nights grew colder than they ought to have been. Finally, in a gap between two high hills, there appeared a tiny speck of greenish ice. Rapidly it increased in size. A gigantic glacier came sliding downhill. Huge stones were being pushed into the valley. With the noise of a dozen thun- derstorms torrents of ice and mud and blocks of granite sud- denly tumbled among the people of the forest and killed them while they slept. Century old trees were crushed into kindling wood. And then it began to snow. It snowed for months and months. All the plants died and the animals fled in search of the southern sun. Man hoisted his young upon his back and followed them. But he could not travel as fast as the wilder creatures and he was forced to choose between quick thinking or quick dying. He seems to have preferred the former for he has managed to survive the terrible glacial periods which upon four dilFerent occasions threatened to kill every human being on the face of the earth. In the first place it was necessary that man clothe himself lest he freeze to death. He learned how to dig holes and cover them with branches and leaves and in these traps he caught bears and hyenas, which he then killed with heavy stones and whose skins he used as coats for himself and his family. Next came the housing problem. This was simple. Many animals were in the habit of sleeping in dark caves. Man now followed their example, drove the animals out of their warm homes and claimed them for his own. Even so, the climate was too severe for most people and the old and the young died at a terrible rate. Then a genius bethought himself of the use of fire. Once, while out hunting, he had been caught in a forest-fire. He remembered that he had been almost roasted to death by the flames. Thus far fire had been an enemy. Now it became a friend. A dead tree PREHISTORIC MAN 15 ^BTIf£.Ar/Afi; /A/To THE X>€jB/fTB2i ^r O F if^' /e£j /tie Alps * -ir/LL CcUBRBd (filTH ICE. /He BB^f/VAj/Aji^ OF TUB MBbi Ten ^A/^ PREHISTORIC EUROPE 16 THE STORY OF MANKIND was dragged into the cave and lighted by means of smoulder- ing branches from a burning wood. This turned the cave into a cozy little room. And then one evening a dead chicken fell into the fire. It was not rescued until it had been well roasted. Man discovered that meat tasted better when cooked and he then and there discarded one of the old habits which he had shared with the other animals and began to prepare his food. In this way thousands of years passed. Only the people with the cleverest brains survived. They had to struggle day and night against cold and hunger. They were forced to invent tools. They learned how to sharpen stones into axes and how to make hammers. They were obliged to put up large stores of food for the endless days of the winter and they found that clay could be made into bowls and jars and hardened in the rays of the sun. And so the glacial period, which had threat- ened to destroy the human race, became its greatest teacher because it forced man to use his brain. HIEROGLYPHICS THE EGYPTIANS INVENT THE ART OF WRITING AND THE RECORD OF HISTORY BEGINS These earliest ancestors of ours who lived in the great European wilderness were rapidly learning many new things It is safe to say that in due course of time they would have given up the ways of savages and would have developed a civilisation of their own. But suddenly there came an end to their isolation. They were discovered. A traveller from an unknown southland who had dared to cross the sea and the high mountain passes had found his way to the wild people of the European continent. He came from Africa. His home was in Egypt. The valley of the Nile had developed a high stage of civili- sation thousands of years before the people of the west had dreamed of the possibilities of a fork or a wheel or a house. And we shall therefore leave our great-great-grandfathers in their caves, while we visit the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean, where stood the earliest school of the human race. The Egyptians have taught us many things. They were excellent farmers. They knew all about irrigation. They built temples which were afterwards copied by the Greeks and which served as the earliest models for the churches in which we wor- ship nowadays. They had invented a calendar which proved 17 18 THE STORY OF MANKIND such a useful instrument for the purpose of measuring time that it has survived with a few changes until today. But most important of all, the Egyptians had learned how to preserve speech for the benefit of future generations. They had in- vented the art of writing. We are so accustomed to newspapers and books and maga- zines that we take it for granted that the world has always been able to read and write. As a matter of fact, writing, the most important of all inventions, is quite new. Without written documents we would be like cats and dogs, who can only teach their kittens and their puppies a few simple things and who, because they cannot write, possess no way in which they can make use of the experience of those generations of cats and dogs that have gone before. In the first century before our era, when the Romans came to Egypt, they found the valley full of strange little pic- tures which seemed to have something to do with the history of the country. But the Romans were not interested in "any- thing foreign" and did not inquire into the origin of these queer figures which covered the walls of the temples and the walls of the palaces and endless reams of flat sheets made out of the papyrus reed. The last of the Egyptian priests who had understood the holy art of making such pictures had died sev- eral years before. Egypt deprived of its independence had become a store-house filled with important historical documents which no one could decipher and which were of no earthly use to either man or beast. Seventeen centuries went by and Egypt remained a land of mystery. But in the year 1798 a French general by the name of Bonaparte happened to visit eastern Africa to pre- pare for an attack upon the British Indian Colonies. He did not get beyond the Nile, and his campaign was a failure. But, quite accidentally, the famous French expedition solved the problem of the ancient Egyptian picture-language. One day a young French officer, much bored by the dreary life of his little fortress on the Rosetta river (a mouth of the Nile) decided to spend a few idle hours rummaging among HIEROGLYPHICS 19 the ruins of the Nile Delta. And behold! he found a stone which greatly puzzled him. Like everything else in Egypt it was covered with little figures. But this particular slab of black basalt was different from anything that had ever been discovered. It carried three inscriptions. One of these was in Greek. The Greek language was known. "All that is necessary," so he reasoned, "is to compare the Greek text with the Egyptian figures, and they will at once tell their secrets." The plan sounded simple enough but it took more than twenty years to solve the riddle. In the year 1802 a French professor by the name of Champollion began to compare the Greek and the Egyptian texts of the famous Rosetta stone. In the year 1823 he announced that he had discovered the mean- ing of fourteen little figures. A short time later he died from overwork, but the main principles of Egyptian writing had become known. Today the story of the valley of the Nile is better known to us than the story of the Mississippi River. We possess a written record which covers four thousand years of chronicled history. As the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics (the word means "sacred writing") have played such a very great role in his- tory, (a few of them in modified form have even found their way into our own alphabet,) you ought to know something about the ingenious system which was used fifty centuries ago to preserve the spoken word for the benefit of the coming generations. Of course, you know what a sign language is. Every Indian story of our western plains has a chapter devoted to strange messages written in the form of little pictures which tell how many buffaloes were killed and how many hunters there were in a certain party. As a rule it is not difficult to understand the meaning of such messages. Ancient Egyptian, however, was not a sign language. The clever people of the Nile had passed beyond that stage long before. Their pictures meant a great deal more than the object which they represented, as I shall try to explain to you now. so THE STORY OF MANKIND Suppose that you were Champollion, and that you were examining a stack of papyrus sheets, all covered with hiero- glyphics. Suddenly you came across a picture of a man with a saw. "Very well," you would say, "that means of course that a farmer went out to cut down a tree." Then you take another papyrus. It tells the story of a queen who had died at the age of eighty-two. In the midst of a sentence appears the picture of the man with the saw. Queens of eighty-two do not handle saws. The picture therefore must mean something else. But what? That is the riddle which the Frenchman finally solved. He discovered that the Egyptians were the first to use what we now call "phonetic writing" — a system of characters which reproduce the "sound" (or phone) of the spoken word and which make it possible for us to translate all our spoken words into a written form, with the help of only a few dots and dashes and pothooks. Let us return for a moment to the little fellow with the saw. The word "saw" either means a certain tool which you will find in a carpenter's shop, or it means the past tense of the verb "to see." This is what had happened to the word during the course of centuries. First of all it had meant only the particular tool which it represented. Then that meaning had been lost and it had become the past participle of a verb. After several hun- dred years, the Egyptians lost sight of both these meanings and the picture came to stand for a single letter, the letter S. A short sentence will show you what I mean. Here is a modem English sentence as it would have been written in hieroglyphics. HIEROGLYPHICS 21 The £ either means one of these two round objects in your head, which allow you to see or it means "I," the per- son who is talking. A is either an insect which gathers honey, or it represents the verb "to be" which means to exist. Again, it may be the first part of a verb like "be-come" or "be-have." In this particular instance it is followed by which means a "leaf" or "leave" or "lieve" (the sound of all three words is the same ) . The "eye" you know all about. Finally you get the picture of a It is a giraiFe. It is part of the old sign-language out of which the hieroglyph- ics developed. You can now read that sentence without much difficulty. "I believe I saw a giraffe." Having invented this system the Egyptians developed it during thousands of years until they could write anything they wanted, and they used these "canned words" to send messages to friends, to keep business accounts and to keep a record of the history of their country, that future generations might benefit by the mistakes of the past. THE NILE VALLEY THE BEGINNING OF CIVILISATION IN THE VALLEY OF THE NILE The history of man is the record of a hungry creature in search of food. Wherever food was plentiful, thither man has travelled to make his home. The fame of the Valley of the Nile must have spread at an early date. From the interior of Africa and from the desert of Arabia and from the western part of Asia people had flocked to Egypt to claim their share of the rich farms. Together these invaders had formed a new race which called itself "Remi" or "the Men" just as we sometimes call America "God's own country." They had good reason to be grateful to a Fate which had carried them to this narrow strip of land. In the summer of each year the Nile turned the valley into a I shallow lake and when the waters receded all the grainfields and the pastures were covered with several inches of the most fertile clay. In Egypt a kindly river did the work of a million men and made it possible to feed the teeming population of the first large cities of which we have any record. It is true that all the arable land was not in the valley. But a comphcated system of small canals and well-sweeps carried water from the river-level to the top of the highest banks and an even more intricate system of irrigation trenches spread it through- out the land. 22 THE NILE VALLEY ^>^jm:>?^»7»5 /C^l^fA ^/i<)2>os THE ISLAND-BRIDGES BETWEEN ASIA AND EUROPE THE tEGEAN sea 53 had been the first people to make a daily use of the hitherto unknown bathtub. The palace of their King had been famous for its winding staircases and its large banqueting hall. The cellars underneath this palace, where the wine and the grain and the olive-oil were stored, had been so vast and had so greatly impressed the first Greek visitors, that they had given rise to the story of the "labyrinth," the name which we give to a structure with so many complicated passages that it is almost impossible to find our way out, once the front door has closed upon our frightened selves. But what finally became of this great ^gean Empire and what caused its sudden downfall, that I can not tell. The Cretans were familiar with the art of writing, but no one has yet been able to decipher their inscriptions. Their history therefore is unknown to us. We have to reconstruct the record of their adventures from the ruins which the ^geans have left behind. These ruins make it clear that the ^gean world was suddenly conquered by a less civilised race which had recently come from the plains of northern Europe. Unless we are very much mistaken, the savages who were responsible for the destruction of the Cretan and the ^gean civilisation were none other than certain tribes of wandering shepherds who had just taken possession of the rocky penin- sula between the Adriatic and the iEgean seas and who are known to us as Greeks. MEANWHILE THE INDO-EUROPEAN TRIBE OF THE HELLENES WAS TAKING POSSESSION OF GREECE The Pyramids were a thousand years old and were begin- ning to show the first signs of decay, and Hammurabi, the wise king of Babylon, had been dead and buried several cen- turies, when a small tribe of shepherds left their homes along AN ^GEAN CITY ON THE GREEK MAINLAND 54 THE GREEKS 55 THE ACH^ANS TAKE AN ^GEAN CITY the banks of the River Danube and wandered southward in search of fresh pastures. They called themselves Hellenes, after Hellen, the son of Deucalion and Pyrrha. According to the old myths these were the only two human beings who had escaped the great flood, which countless years before had destroyed all the people of the world, when they had grown so wicked that they disgusted Zeus, the mighty God, who lived on Mount Olympus. Of these early Hellenes we know nothing. Thucydides, the historian of the fall of Athens, describing his earliest an- cestors, said that they "did not amount to very much," and this was probably true. They were very ill-mannered. They lived like pigs and threw the bodies of their enemies to the wild dogs who guarded their sheep. They had very little respect for other people's rights, and they killed the natives of the Greek peninsula (who were called the Pelasgians) and stole their farms and took their cattle and made their wives and daughters slaves and wrote endless songs praising the courage of the clan of the Achaeans, who had led the Hellenic advance- guard into the mountains of Thessaly and the Peloponessus. 56 THE STORY OF MANKIND But here and there, on the tops of high rocks, they saw the castles of the ^geans and those they did not attack for they feared the metal swords and the spears of the ^^Ggean soldiers and knew that they could not hope to defeat them with their clumsy stone axes. For many centuries they continued to wander from valley to valley and from mountain side to mountain side. Then the whole of the land had been occupied and the migration had come to an end. That moment was the beginning of Greek civilisation. The Greek farmer, living within sight of the Mgean colonies, was finally driven by curiosity to visit his haughty neighbours. He discovered that he could learn many useful things from the men who dwelt behind the high stone walls of Mycenae and Tiryns. He was a clever pupil. Within a short time he mastered the art of handling those strange iron weapons which the ^geans had brought from Babylon and from Thebes. He came to understand the mysteries of navigation. He began to build little boats for his own use. And when he had learned everything the ^geans could y>*^;i|jyft*»^mt<« THE STORY OF MANKIND ble men. But in the long run, this state of affairs became un- bearable. Then attempts were made to bring about reforms and out of these reforms grew the first democratic government of which the world has a record. It was early in the seventh century that the people of Athens decided to do some housecleaning and give the large number of freemen once more a voice in the government as they were supposed to have had in the days of their Achaean ancestors. They asked a man by the name of Draco to pro- vide them with a set of laws that would protect the poor against the aggressions of the rich. Draco set to work. Unfortu- nately he was a professional lawyer and very much out of touch with ordinary life. In his eyes a crime was a crime and when he had finished his code, the people of Athens discovered that these Draconian laws were so severe that they could not pos- sibly be put into effect. There would not have been rope enough to hang all the criminals under their new system of jurisprudence which made the stealing of an apple a capital offence. The Athenians looked about for a more humane reformer. At last they found some one who could do that sort of thing better than anybody else. His name was Solon. He belonged to a noble family and he had travelled all over the world and had studied the forms of government of many other countries. After a careful study of the subject, Solon gave Athens a set of laws which bore testimony to that wonderful principle of moderation which was part of the Greek character. He tried to improve the condition of the peasant without however de- stroying the prosperity of the nobles who were (or rather who could be) of such great service to the state as soldiers. To pro- tect the poorer classes against abuse on the part of the judges (who were always elected from the class of the nobles because they received no salary) Solon made a provision whereby a citizen with a grievance had the right to state his case before a jury of thirty of his fellow Athenians. Most important of all, Solon forced the average freeman to take a direct and personal interest in the affairs of the city. GREEK SELF-GOVERNMENT 65 No longer could he stay at home and say "oh, I am too busy today" or "it is raining and I had better stay indoors." He was expected to do his share ; to be at the meeting of the town council ; and carry part of the responsibility for the safety and the prosperity of the state. This government by the "demos," the people, was often far from successful. There was too much idle talk. There were too many hateful and spiteful scenes between rivals for official honor. But it taught the Greek people to be independent and to rely upon themselves for their salvation and that was a very good thing. HOW THE GREEKS LIVED But how, you will ask, did the ancient Greeks have time to look after their families and their business if they were forever running to the market-place to discuss affairs of state? In this chapter I shall tell you. In all matters of government, the Greek democracy recog- nised only one class of citizens — ^the freemen. Every Greek city was composed of a small number of free bom citizens, a large number of slaves and a sprinkling of foreigners. At rare intervals (usually during a war, when men were needed for the army) the Greeks showed themselves willing to confer the rights of citizenship upon the "barbarians" as they called the foreigners. But this was an exception. Citizenship was a matter of birth. You were an Athenian because your father and your grandfather had been Athenians before you. But however great your merits as a trader or a soldier, if you were born of non-Athenian parents, you remained a "for- eigner" until the end of time. The Greek city, therefore, whenever it was not ruled by a king or a tyrant, was run by and for the freemen, and this would not have been possible without a large army of slaves who outnumbered the free citizens at the rate of six or five to one and who performed those tasks to which we modern people must devote most of our time and energy if we wish to provide for our families and pay the rent of our apartments. 66 GREEK LIFE 67 The slaves did all the cooking and baking and candlestick making of the entire city. They were the tailors and the car- penters and the jewelers and the school-teachers and the book- keepers and they tended the store and looked after the factory while the master went to the public meeting to discuss ques- tions of war and peace or visited the theatre to see the latest play of ^schylus or hear a discussion of the revolutionary ideas GREEK SOCIETY of Euripides, who had dared to express certain doubts upon the omnipotence of the great god Zeus. Indeed, ancient Athens resembled a modern club. All the freeborn citizens were hereditary members and all the slaves were hereditary servants, and waited upon the needs of their masters, and it was very pleasant to be a member of the or- ganisation. But when we talk about slaves, we do not mean the sort of 68 THE STORY OF MANKIND people about whom you have read in the pages of "Uncle Tom's Cabin." It is true that the position of those slaves who tilled the fields was a very unpleasant one, but the average freeman who had come down in the world and who had been obliged to hire himself out as a farm hand led just as miser- able a life. In the cities, furthermore, many of the slaves were more prosperous than the poorer classes of the freemen. For the Greeks, who loved moderation in all things, did not like to treat their slaves after the fashion which afterward was so common in Rome, where a slave had as few rights as an engine in a modern factory and could be thrown to the wild animals upon the smallest pretext. The Greeks accepted slavery as a necessary institution, without which no city could possibly become the home of a truly civilised people. The slaves also took care of those tasks which nowadays are performed by the business men and the professional men. As for those household duties which take up so much of the time of your mother and which worry your father when he comes home from his office, the Greeks, who understood the value of leisure, had reduced such duties to the smallest possible mini- mum by living amidst surroundings of extreme simplicity. To begin with, their homes were very plain. Even the rich nobles spent their lives in a sort of adobe barn, which lacked all the comforts which a modern workman expects as his natu- ral right. A Greek home consisted of four walls and a roof. There was a door which led into the street but there were no windows. The kitchen, the living rooms and the sleeping quar- ters were built around an open courtyard in which there was a small fountain, or a statue and a few plants to make it look bright. Within this courtyard the family lived when it did not rain or when it was not too cold. In one corner of the yard the cook (who was a slave) prepared the meal and in another corner, the teacher (who was also a slave) taught the children the alpha beta gamma and the tables of multiplication and in still another corner the lady of the house, who rarely left her THE TEMPLE GREEK LIFE 69 domain (since it was not considered good form for a married woman to be seen on the street too often) was repairing her husband's coat with her seamstresses (who were slaves,) and in the little office, right off the door, the master was inspecting the accounts which the overseer of his farm (who was a slave) had just brought to him. When dinner was ready the family came together but the meal was a verj simple one and did not take much time. The Greeks seem to have regarded eating as an unavoidable evil and not a pastime, which kills many dreary hours and eventu- ally kills many dreary people. They lived on bread and on wine, with a little meat and some green vegetables. They drank water only when nothing else was available because they did not think it very healthy. They loved to call on each other for dinner, but our idea of a festive meal, where every- body is supposed to eat much more than is good for him, would have disgusted them. They came together at the table for the purpose of a good talk and a good glass of wine and water, but as they were moderate people they despised those who drank too much. The same simplicity which prevailed in the dining room also dominated their choice of clothes. They liked to be clean and well groomed, to have their hair and beards neatly cut, to feel their bodies strong with the exercise and the swimming of the gymnasium, but they never followed the Asiatic fashion which prescribed loud colours and strange patterns. They wore a long white coat and they managed to look as smart as a modern Italian officer in his long blue cape. They loved to see their wives wear ornaments but they thought it very vulgar to display their wealth (or their wives) in public and whenever the women left their home they were as inconspicuous as possible. In short, the story of Greek life is a story not only of mod- eration but also of simphcity. "Things," chairs and tables and books and houses and carriages, are apt to take up a great deal of their owner's time. In the end they invariably make 70 THE STORY OF MANKIND him their slave and his hours are spent looking after their wants, keeping them polished and brushed and painted. The Greeks, before everj'ihing else, wanted to be "free," both in mind and in body. That they might maintain their liberty, and be truly free in spirit, they reduced their daily needs to the lowest possible point. THE GREEK THEATRE THE ORIGINS OF THE THEATRE, THE FIRST FORM OF PUBLIC AMUSEMENT At a very early stage of their history the Greeks had be- gun to collect the poems, which had been written in honor of their brave ancestors who had driven the Pelasgians out of Hellas and had destroyed the power of Troy. These poems were recited in public and everybody came to listen to them. But the theatre, the form of entertainment which has become almost a necessary part of our own lives, did not grow out of these recited heroic tales. It had such a curious origin that I must tell you something about it in a separate chapter. The Greeks had always been fond of parades. Every year they held solemn processions in honor of Dionysos the God of the wine. As everybody in Greece drank wine (the Greeks thought water only useful for the purpose of swimming and sailing) this particular Divinity was as popular as a God of the Soda-Fountain would be in our own land. And because the Wine-God was supposed to live in the vineyards, amidst a merry mob of Satyrs (strange creatures who were half man and half goat), the crowd that joined the procession used to wear goat-skins and to hee-haw like real billy-goats. The Greek word for ffoat is "tragos" and the Greek word for singer is "oidos." The singer who meh-mehed like a goat therefore was called a "tragos-oidos" or goat singer, and it is this strange name which developed into the modern 71 72 THE STORY OF MANKIND word "Tragedy," which means in the theatrical sense a piece with an unhappy ending, just as Comedy {which really means the singing of something "comos" or gay) is the name given to a play which ends happily. But how, you will ask, did this noisy chorus of masquer- aders, stamping around like wild goats, ever develop into the noble tragedies which have filled the theatres of the world for almost two thousand years? The connecting link between the goat-singer and Hamlet is really very simple as I shall show you in a moment. The singing chorus was very amusing in the beginning and attracted large crowds of spectators who stood along the side of the road and laughed. But soon this business of hee-hawing grew tiresome and the Greeks thought dullness an evil only comparable to ughness or sickness. They asked for some- thing more entertaining. Then an inventive young poet from the village of Icaria in Attica hit upon a new idea which proved a tremendous success. He made one of the members of the goat-chorus step forward and engage in conversation with the leader of the musicians who marched at the head of the parade playing upon their pipes of Pan. This individual was al- lowed to step out of line. He waved his arms and gesticulated while he spoke (that is to say he "acted" while the others merely stood by and sang) and he asked a lot of questions, which the bandmaster answered according to the roll of papyrus upon which the poet had written down these answers before the show began. This rough and ready conversation — the dialogue — which told the story of Dionysos or one of the other Gods, became at once popular with the crowd. Henceforth every Diony- sian procession had an "acted scene" and very soon the "acting" was considered more important than the procession and the meh-mehing. i^Eschylus, the most successful of all "tragedians" who wrote no less than eighty plays during his long life (from 526 to 4i55) made a bold step forward when he introduced two "actors" instead of one. A generation later Sophocles increased the THE GREEK THEATRE 73 number of actors to three. When Euripides began to write his terrible tragedies in the middle of the fifth century, B.C., he was allowed as many actors as he liked and when Aristo- phanes wrote those famous comedies in which he poked fun at everybody and everything, including the Gods of Mount Olym^ pus, the chorus had been reduced to the role of mere by- standers who were lined up behind the principal performers and who sang "this is a terrible world" while the hero in the foreground committed a crime against the will of the Gods. This new form of dramatic entertainment demanded a proper setting, and soon every Greek city owned a theatre, cut out of the rock of a nearby hill. The spectators sat upon wooden benches and faced a wide circle (our present orches- tra where you pay three dollars and thirty cents for a seat). Upon this half -circle, which was the stage, the actors and the chorus took their stand. Behind them there was a tent where they made up with large clay masks which hid their faces and which showed the spectators whether the actors were supposed to be happy and smiling or unhappy and weeping. The Greek word for tent is "skene" and that is the reason why we talk of the "scenery" of the stage. When once the tragedy had become part of Greek life, the people took it very seriously and never went to the theatre to give their minds a vacation. A new play became as impor- tant an event as an election and a successful playwright was received with greater honors than those bestowed upon a gen- eral who had just returned from a famous victory. HOW THE GREEKS DEFENDED EUROPE AGAINST ASIATIC INVASION AND DROVE THE PERSIANS BACK ACROSS THE ^GEAN SEA The Greeks had learned the art of trading from the iEgeans who had been the pupils of the Phoenicians. They had founded colonies after the Phoenician pattern. They had even improved upon the Phoenician methods by a more general use of money in dealing with foreign customers. In the sixth century before our era they had established themselves firmly along the coast of Asia Minor and they were taking away trade from the Phoenicians at a fast rate. This the Phoeni- cians of course did not like but they were not strong enough to risk a war with their Greek competitors. They sat and waited nor did they wait in vain. In a former chapter, I have told you how a humble tribe of Persian shepherds had suddenly gone upon the warpath and had conquered the greater part of western Asia. The Per- sians were too civilised to plunder their new subjects. They contented themselves with a yearly tribute. When they reached the coast of Asia Minor they insisted that the Greek colonies of Lydia recognize the Persian Kings as their over- Lords and pay them a stipulated tax. The Greek colonies objected. The Persians insisted. Then the Greek colonies 74 THE PERSIAN WARS 76 appealed to the home-country and the stage was set for a quarrel. For if the truth be told, the Persian Kings regarded the Greek city-states as very dangerous political institutions and bad examples for all other people who were supposed to be the patient slaves of the mighty Persian Kings. Of course, the Greeks enjoyed a certain degree of safety be- cause their country lay hidden beyond the deep waters of the THE PERSIAN FLEET IS DESTROYED NEAR MOUNT ATHOS .^gean. But here their old enemies, the Phoenicians, stepped forward with offers of help and advice to the Persians. If the Persian King would provide the soldiers, the Phoenicians would guarantee to deliver the necessary ships to carry them to Europe. It was the year 492 before the birth of Christ, and Asia made ready to destroy the rising power of Europe. As a final warning the King of Persia sent messengers to the Greeks asking for "earth and water" as a token of their submission. The Greeks promptly threw the messengers into the nearest well where they would find both "earth and water" in large abundance and thereafter of course peace was im- possible. 76 THE STORY OF MANKIND But the Gods of High Olympus watched over their chil- dren and when the Phoenician fleet carrying the Persian troops was near Mount Athos, the Storm-God blew his cheeks until he almost burst the veins of his brow, and the fleet was de- stroyed by a terrible hurricane and the Persians were all drowned. Two years later they returned. This time they sailed straight across the ^gean Sea and landed near the village of C?AitA THOA/ THE BATTLE OF MARATHON Marathon. As soon as the Athenians heard this they sent their army of ten thousand men to guard the hills that sur- rounded the Marathonian plain. At the same time they des- patched a fast runner to Sparta to ask for help. But Sparta was envious of the fame of Athens and refused to come to her assistance. The other Greek cities followed her example with the exception of tiny Plataea which sent a thousand men. On the twelfth of September of the year 490, Miltiades, the Athen- ian conmiander, threw this little army against the hordes of the i THE PERSIAN WARS 77 Persians. The Greeks broke through the Persian barrage of arrows and their spears caused terrible havoc among the disor- ganised Asiatic troops who had never been called upon to re- sist such an enemy. That night the people of Athens watched the sky grow red with the flames of burning ships. Anxiously they waited for news. At last a little cloud of dust appeared upon the road that led to the North. It was Pheidippides, the runner. He stumbled and gasped for his end was near. Only a few daj^s before had he returned from his errand to Sparta. He had hastened to join Miltiades. That morning he had jbaken part in the attack and later he had volunteered to carry the news of victory to his beloved city. The people saw him fall and they rushed forward to support him. "We have won," he whispered and then he died, a glorious death which made him envied of all men. As for the Persians, they tried, after this defeat, to land near Athens but they found the coast guarded and disap- peared, and once more the land of Hellas was at peace. Eight years they waited and during this time the Greeks were not idle. They knew that a final attack was to be expected but they did not agi-ee upon the best way to avert the danger. Some people wanted to increase the army. Others said that a strong fleet was necessary for success. The two parties led by Aristides (for the army) and Themistocles (the leader of the bigger-navy men) fought each other bitterly and nothing was done until Aristides was exiled. Then Themistocles had his chance and he built all the ships he could and turned the Piraeus into a strong naval base. In the year 481 B.C. a tremendous Persian army appeared in Thessaly, a province of northern Greece. In this hour of danger, Sparta, the great military city of Greece, was elected commander-in-chief. But the Spartans cared little what hap- pened to northern Greece provided their own country was not invaded. They neglected to fortify the passes that led into Greece. 78 THE STORY OF MANKIND A small detachment of Spar- tans under Leonidas had been told to guard the narrow road be- tween the high mountains and the sea which connected Thessaly with the southern provinces. Leonidas obeyed his orders. He fought and held the pass with unequalled bravery. But a traitor by the name of Ephialtes who knew the little byways of Malis guided a regiment of Per- sians through the hills and made it possible for them to attack Leonidas in the rear. Near the Warm Wells — the Thermopylae — a terrible battle was fought. When night came Leonidas and his faithful soldiers lay dead under the corpses of their enemies. But the pass had been lost and the greater part of Greece fell into the hands of the Persians. They marched upon Athens, threw the garrison from the rocks of the Acropolis and THERMOPYLAE THE BATTLE OF THERMOPYLAE THE PERSIAN WARS 79 burned the city. The people fled to the Island of Salamis. All seemed lost. But on the 20th of September of the year 480 Themistocles forced the Persian fleet to give battle within the narrow straits which separated the Island of Salamis from the mainland and within a few hours he destroyed three quarters of the Persian ships. In this way the victory of Thermopylae came to naught. THE PERSIANS BURN ATHENS Xerxes was forced to retire. The next year, so he decreed, would bring a final decision. He took his troops to Thessaly and there he waited for spring. But this time the Spartans understood the seriousness of the hour. They left the safe shelter of the wall which they had built across the isthmus of Corinth and under the leadership of Pausanias they marched against Mardonius the Persian general. The united Greeks ( some one hundred thousand men from a dozen different cities) attacked the three hundred thou- 80 THE STORY OF MANKIND sand men of the enemy near Plataea. Once more the heavy Greek infantry broke through the Persian barrage of arrows. The Persians were defeated, as they had been at Marathon, and this time they left for good. By a strange coincidence^ the same day that the Greek armies won their victory near Plataea, the Athenian ships destroyed the enemy's fleet near Cape My- cale in Asia Minor. Thus did the first encounter between Asia and Europe end. Athens had covered herself with glory and Sparta had fought bravely and well. If these two cities had been able to come to an agreement, if they had been willing to forget their little jealousies, they might have become the leaders of a strong and united Hellas. But alas, they allowed the hour of victory and enthusiasm to slip by, and the same opportunity never returned. ATHENS vs, SPARTA HOW ATHENS AND SPARTA FOUGHT A LONG AND DISASTROUS WAR FOR THE LEADER- SHIP OF GREECE Athens and Sparta were both Greek cities and their people spoke a common language. In every other respect they were different. "J" Athens rose high from the plain. It was a city exposed to the fresh breezes from the sea, willing to look at the world with the eyes of a happy child. Sparta, on the other hand, was built at the bottom of a deep valley, and used the surrounding mountains as a barrier against foreign thought. Athens was a city of busy trade. Sparta was an armed camp where people were soldiers for the sake of being soldiers. The people of Athens loved to sit in the sun and discuss poetry or listen to the wise words of a philosopher. The Spartans, on the other hand, never wrote a single line that was considered litera- ture, but they knew how to fight, they liked to fight, and they sacrificed all human emotions to their ideal of military pre- paredness. No wonder that these sombre Spartans viewed the success of Athens with malicious hate. The energy which the defence of the common home had developed in Athens was now used for purposes of a more peaceful nature. The Acropolis was re- built and was made into a marble shrine to the Goddess Athena. Pericles, the leader of the Athenian democracy, sent far and wide to find famous sculptors and painters and scientists^^to 81 82 THE STORY OF MANKIND make the city more beautiful and the young Athenians more worthy of their home. At the same time he kept a watchful eye on Sparta and built high walls which connected Athens with the sea and made her the strongest fortress of that day. An insignificant quarrel between two little Greek cities led to the final conflict. For thirty years the war between Athens and Sparta continued. It ended in a terrible disaster for Athens. During the third year of the war the plague had entered the city. More than half of the people and Pericles, the great leader, had been killed. The plague was followed by a period of bad and untrustworthy leadership. A brilliant young fel- low by the name of Alcibiades had gained the favor of the popular assembly. He suggested a raid upon the Spartan colony of Syracuse in Sicily. An expedition was equipped and everything was ready. But Alcibiades got mixed up in a street brawl and was forced to flee. The general who succeeded him was a bungler. First he lost his ships and then he lost his army, and the few surviving Athenians were thrown into the stone-quarries of Syracuse, where they died from hunger and thirst. The expedition had killed all the young men of Athens. The city was doomed. After a long siege the town surrendered in April of the year 404. The high walls were demolished. The navy was taken away by the Spartans. Athens ceased to exist as the center of the great colonial empire which it had conquered during the days of its prosperity. But that won- derful desire to learn and to know and to investigate which had distinguished her free citizens during the days of great- ness and prosperity did not perish with the walls and the ships. It continued to live. It became even more brilliant. Athens no longer shaped the destinies of the land of Greece. But now, as the home of the first great university the city be- gan to influence the minds of intelligent people far beyond the narrow frontiers of Hellas. ALEXANDER THE GREAT ALEXANDER THE MACEDONIAN ESTAB- LISHES A GREEK WORLD-EMPIRE, AND WHAT BECAME OF THIS HIGH AMBITION When the Ach^eans had left their homes along the banks of the Danube to look for pastures new, they had spent some time among the mountains of Macedonia. Ever since, the Greeks had maintained certain more or less formal relations with the people of this northern country. The Macedonians from their side had kept themselves well informed about con- ditions in Greece. Now it happened, just when Sparta and Athens had fin- ished their disastrous war for the leadership of Hellas, that IMacedonia was ruled by an extraordinarily clever man by the name of Philip. He admired the Greek spirit in letters and art but he despised the Greek lack of self-control in political affairs. It irritated him to see a perfectly good people waste its men and money upon fruitless quarrels. So he settled the difficulty by making himself the master of all Greece and then he asked his new subjects to join him on a voyage which he meant to pay to Persia in return for the visit which Xerxes had paid the Greeks one hundred and fifty years before. Unfortunately Philip was murdered before he could start upon this well-prepared expedition. The task of avenging the destruction of Athens was left to Philip's son Alexander, the beloved pupil of Aristotle, wisest of all Greek teachers. 83 84 THE STORY OF MANKIND Alexander bade farewell to Europe in the spring of the year 334 B.C. Seven years later he reached India. In the meantime he had destroyed Phoenicia, the old rival of the Greek merchants. He had conquered Egypt and had been worshipped by the people of the Nile valley as the son and heir of the Pharaohs. He had defeated the last Persian king — ^he had overthrown the Persian empire — he had given orders to re- build Babylon — he had led his troops into the heart of the Himalayan mountains and had made the entire world a Mace- donian province and dependency. Then he stopped and an- nounced even more ambitious plans. The newly formed Empire must be brought under the influ- ence of the Greek mind. The people must be taught the Greek language — they must live in cities built after a Greek model. The Alexandrian soldier now turned school-master. The mili- tary camps of yesterday became the peaceful centres of the newly imported Greek civilisation. Higher and higher did the flood of Greek manners and Greek customs rise, when sud- denly Alexander was stricken with a fever and died in the old palace of King Hammurabi of Babylon in the year 323. Then the waters receded. But they left behind the fertile clay of a higher civilisation and Alexander, with all his childish ambitions and his silly vanites, had performed a most valuable service. His Empire did not long survive him. A number of ambitious generals divided the territory among themselves. But they too remained faithful to the dream of a great world brotherhood of Greek and Asiatic ideas and knowledge. They maintained their independence until the Romans added western Asia and Egypt to their other domains. The strange inheritance of this Hellenistic civilisation (part Greek, part Persian, part Egyptian and Babylonian) fell to the Roman conquerors. During the following centuries, it got such a firm hold upon the Roman world, that we feel its in- fluence in our own lives this very day. GREECE A SUMMARY A SHORT SUMMARY OF CHAPTERS 1 to 20 Thus far, from the top of our high tower we have been looking eastward. But from this time on, the history of Egypt and Mesopotamia is going to grow less interesting and I must take you to study the western landscape. Before we do this, let us stop a moment and make clear to ourselves what we have seen. First of all I showed you prehistoric man — a creature very simple in his habits and very unattractive in his manners. I told you how he was the most defenceless of the many animals that roamed through the early wilderness of the five continents, but being possessed of a larger and better brain, he managed to hold his own. Then came the glaciers and the many centuries of cold weather, and life on this planet became so difficult that man was obliged to think three times as hard as ever before if he wished to survive. Since, however, that "wish to survive" was (and is) the mainspring which keeps every living being going full tilt to the last gasp of its breath, the brain of glacial man was set to work in all earnestness. Not only did these hardy people man- age to exist through the long cold spells which killed many ferocious animals, but when the earth became warm and com- fortable once more, prehistoric man had learned a number of things which gave him such great advantages over his less in- telligent neighbors that the danger of extinction (a very serious 85 86 THE STORY OF MANKIND one during the first half million years of man's residence upon this planet) became a very remote one. I told you how these earliest ancestors of ours were slowly plodding along when suddenly (and for reasons that are not well understood) the people who lived in the valley of the Nile rushed ahead and almost over night, created the first centre of civilisation. Then I showed you Mesopotamia, "the land between the rivers," which was the second great school of the human race. And I made j^ou a map of the little island bridges of the ^gean Sea, which carried the knowledge and the science of the old east to the young west, where lived the Greeks. Next I told you of an Indo-European tribe, called the Hel- lenes, who thousands of years before had left the heart of Asia and who had in the eleventh century before our era pushed their way into the rocky peninsula of Greece and who, since then, have been known to us as the Greeks. And I told j^ou the story of the little Greek cities that were really states, where the civilisation of old Egypt and Asia was transfigured (that is a big word, but you can "figure out" what it means) into something quite new, something that was much nnhlpr and finer than anything that had gone before. When you look at the map you will see how by this time civilisation has described a semi-circle. It begins in Egypt, and by way of Mesopotamia and the JEgean Islands it moves westward until it reaches the European continent. The first four thousand years, Egyptians and Babylonians and Phoeni- cians and a large number of Semitic tribes (please remember that the Jews were but one of a large number of Semitic peo- ples) have carried the torch that was to illuminate the world. They now hand it over to the Indo-European Greeks, who be- come the teachers of another Indo-European tribe, called the Romans. But meanwhile the Semites have pushed westward along the northern coast of Africa and have made themselves the rulers of the western half of the Mediterranean just when the eastern half has become a Greek (or Indo-European) pos- session. A SUMMARY 87 This, as you shall see in a moment, leads to a terrible con- flict between the two rival races, and out of their struggle arises the victorious Roman Empire, which is to take this Egyptian- Mesopotamian-Greek civilisation to the furthermost corners of the European continent, where it serves as the foundation upon which our modern society is based. I know all this sounds very complicated, but if you get hold of these few principles, the rest of our history will become a great deal simpler. The maps will make clear what the words fail to tell. And after this short intermission, we go back to our story and give you an account of the famous war between Carthage and Rome. THE SEMITIC COLONY OF CARTHAGE ON THE NORTHERN COAST OF AFRICA AND THE INDO-EUROPEAN CITY OF ROME ON THE WEST COAST OF ITALY FOUGHT EACH OTHER FOR THE POSSESSION OF THE WESTERN MEDITERRANEAN AND CARTH- AGE WAS DESTROYED The little Phoenician trading post of Kart-hadshat stood on a low hill which overlooked the African Sea, a stretch of water ninety miles wide which separates Africa from Europe. It was an ideal spot for a commercial centre. Almost too ideal. It grew too fast and became too rich. When in the sixth cen- tury before our era, Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon destroyed Tyre, Carthage broke off all further relations with the Mother Country and became an independent state — ^the great western advance-post of the Semitic races. Unfortunately the city had inherited many of the traits which for a thousand years had been characteristic of the Phoenicians. It was a vast business-house, protected by a strong navy, indifferent to most of the finer aspects of life. The city and the surrounding country and the distant colonies were all ruled by a small but exceedingly powerful group of rich men. The Greek word for rich is "ploutos" and the Greeks 88 ROME AND CARTHAGE 89 called such a government by "rich men" a "Plutocracy." Car- thage was a plutocracy and the real power of the state lay in the hands of a dozen big ship-owners and mine-owners and merchants who met in the back room of an office and regarded their common Fatherland as a business enterprise which ought CARTHAGE I to yield them a decent profit. They were however wide awake and full of energy and worked very hard. As the years went by the influence of Carthage upon her neighbours increased until the greater part of the African coast, Spain and certain regions of France were Carthaginian possessions, and paid tribute, taxes and dividends to the mighty city on the African Sea. Of course, such a "plutocracy" was forever at the mercy of 90 THE STORY OF MANKIND the crowd. As long as there was plenty of work and wages were high, the majority of the citizens were quite contented, allowed their "betters" to rule them and asked no embarrassing questions. But when no ships left the harbor, when no ore was brought to the smelting-ovens, when dockworkers and SPHERES OF INFLUENCE stevedores were thrown out of employment, then there were grumblings and there was a demand that the popular assembly be called together as in the olden days when Carthage had been a self-governing republic. To prevent such an occurrence the plutocracy was obliged to keep the business of the town going at full speed. They had managed to do this very successfully for almost five hun- ROME AND CARTHAGE 91 dred years when they were greatly disturbed by certain rumors which reached them from the western coast of Italy. It was said that a little village on the banks of the Tiber had sud- denly risen to great power and was making itself the acknowl- edged leader of all the Latin tribes who inhabited central Italy. It was also said that this village, which by the way was called Rome, intended to build ships and go after the commerce of Sicily and the southern coast of France. Carthage could not possibly tolerate such competition. The young rival must be destroyed lest the Carthaginian rulers lose their prestige as the absolute rulers of the western Medi- terranean. The rumors were duly investigated and in a gen- eral way these were the facts that came to light. The west coast of Italy had long been neglected by civili- sation. Whereas in Greece all the good harbours faced east- ward and enjoyed a full view of the busy islands of the ^gean, the west coast of Italy contemplated nothing more exciting than the desolate waves of the Mediterranean. The country was poor. It was therefore rarely visited by foreign merchants and the natives were allowed to live in undisturbed possession of their hills and their marshy plains. The first serious invasion of this land came from the north. At an unknown date certain Indo-European tribes had man- aged to find their way through the passes of the Alps and had pushed southward until they had filled the heel and the toe of the famous Italian boot with their villages and their flocks. Of these early conquerors we know nothing. No Homer sang their glory. Their own accounts of the foundation of Rome (written eight hundred years later when the little city had be- come the centre of an Empire ) are fairy stories and do not be- long in a history. Romulus and Remus jumping across each other's walls (I always forget who jumped across whose wall) make entertaining reading, but the foundation of the City of Rome was a much more prosaic affair. Rome began as a thou- sand American cities have done, by being a convenient place for barter and horse-trading. It lay in the heart of the plains 92 THE STORY OF MANKIND ^hL "^ffe. c/Ty of r^o/yte. fi^ /ij^eAf B)^. HOW THE CITY OF ROME HAPPENED ROME AND CARTHAGE 93 of central Italy. The Tiber provided direct access to the sea. The land-road from north to south found here a convenient ford which could be used all the year around. And seven little hills along the banks of the river offered the inhabitants a safe shelter against their enemies who lived in the mountains and those who lived beyond the horizon of the nearby sea. The mountaineers were called the Sabines. They were a rough crowd with an unholy desire for easy plunder. But they were very backward. They used stones axes and wooden shields and were no match for the Romans with their steel swords. The sea-people on the other hand were dangerous foes. They were called the Etruscans and they were (and still are) one of the great mysteries of history. Nobody knew (or knows) whence they came; who they were; what had driven them away from their original homes. We have found the re- mains of their cities and their cemeteries and their waterworks all along the Italian coast. We are familiar with their inscrip- tions. But as no one has ever been able to decipher the Etrus- can alphabet, these written messages are, so far, merely an- noying and not at all useful. Our best guess is that the Etruscans came originally from Asia Minor and that a great war or a pestilence in that coun- try had forced them to go away and seek a new home elsewhere. Whatever the reason for their coming, the Etruscans played a great role in history. They carried the pollen of the ancient civilisation from the east to the west and they taught the Romans who, as we know, came from the north',, the first prin- ciples of architecture and street-building and fighting and art and cookery and medicine and astronomy. But just as the Greeks had not loved their ^gean teachers, in this same way did the Romans hate their Etruscan masters. They got rid of them as soon as they could and the oppor- tunity offered itself when Greek merchants discovered the commercial possibilities of Italy and when the first Greek vessels reached Rome. The Greeks came to trade, but they stayed to instruct. They found the tribes who inhabited the 94 THE STORY OF MANKIND Roman country-side (and who were called the Latins) quite willing to learn such things as might be of practical use. At once they understood the great benefit that could be derived from a written alphabet and they copied that of the Greeks. They also understood the commercial advantages of a well- regulated system of coins and measures and weights. Eventu- ally the Romans swallowed Greek civilisation hook, line and sinker. They even welcomed the Gods of the Greeks to their country. Zeus was taken to Rome where he became known as Jupiter and the other divinities followed him. The Roman Gods however never were quite like their cheerful cousins who had ac- companied the Greeks on their road through life and through history. The Roman Gods were State Functionaries. Each one managed his own department with great prudence and a deep sense of justice, but in turn he was exact in demanding the obedience of his worshippers. This obedience the Romans ren- dered with scrupulous care. But they never established the cordial personal relations and that charming friendship which had existed between the old Hellenes and the mighty residents of the high Olympian peak. The Romans did not imitate the Greek form of govern- ment, but being of the same Indo-European stock as the peo- ple of Hellas, the early history of Rome resembles that of Athens and the other Greek cities. They did not find it diffi- cult to get rid of their kings, the descendants of the ancient tribal chieftains. But once the kings had been driven from the city, the Romans were forced to bridle the power of the nobles, and it took many centuries before they managed to establish a system which gave every free citizen of Rome a chance to take a personal interest in the affairs of his town. Thereafter the Romans enjoyed one great advantage over the Greeks. They managed the affairs of their country with- out making too many speeches. They were less imaginative than the Greeks and they preferred an ounce of action to a pound of words. They understood the tendency of the multi- ROME AND CARTHAGE 95 tude (the "plebs," as the assemblage of free citizens was called) only too well to waste valuable time upon mere talk. They therefore placed the actual business of running the city into the hands of two "consuls" who were assisted by a council of Elders, called the Senate (because the word "senex" means an old man) . As a matter of custom and practical advantage the senators were elected from the nobility. But their power had been strictly defined. Rome at one time had passed through the same sort of struggle between the poor and the rich which had forced Athens to adopt the laws of Draco and Solon. In Rome this conflict had occurred in the fifth century b. c. As a result the freemen had obtained a written code of laws which protected them against the despotism of the aristocratic judges by the institution of the "Tribune." These Tribunes were city-magis- trates, elected by the freemen. They had the right to protect any citizen against those actions of the government officials which were thought to be unjust. A consul had the right to condemn a man to death, but if the case had not been abso- lutely proved the Tribune could interfere and save the poor fellow's life. But when I use the word Rome, I seem to refer to a little city of a few thousand inhabitants. And the real strength of Rome lay in the country districts outside her walls. And it was in the government of these outlying provinces that Rome at an early age showed her wonderful gift as a colonising power. In very early times Rome had been the only strongly for- tified city in central Italy, but it had always offered a hospitable refuge to other Latin tribes who happened to be in danger of attack. The Latin neighbours had recognised the advantages of a close union with such a powerful friend and they had tried to find a basis for some sort of defensive and offensive alli- ance. Other nations, Egyptians, Babylonians, Phoenicians, even Greeks, would have insisted upon a treaty of submission on the part of the "barbarians." The Romans did nothing of 96 THE STORY OF MANKIND the sort. They gave the "outsider" a chance to become part- ners in a common "res publica" — or common-wealth. "You want to join us," they said. "Very well, go ahead and join. We shall treat you as if you were full-fledged citi- zens of Rome. In return for this privilege we expect you to fight for our city, the mother of us all, whenever it shall be nec- essary." The "outsider" appreciated this generosity and he showed his gratitude by his unswerving loyalty. Whenever a Greek city had been attacked, the foreign resi- dents had moved out as quickly as they could. Why defend something which meant nothing to them but a temporary boarding house in which they were tolerated as long as they paid their bills? But when the enemy was before the gates of Rome, all the Latins rushed to her defence. It was their Mother who was in danger. It was their true "home" even if they lived a hundred miles away and had never seen the walls of the sacred Hills. No defeat and no disaster could change this sentiment. In the beginning of the fourth century B.C. the wild Gauls forced their way into Italy. They had defeated the Roman army near the River Allia and had marched upon the city. They had taken Rome and then they expected that the people would come and sue for peace. They waited, but nothing happened. After a short time the Gauls found themselves surrounded by a hostile population which made it impossible for them to obtain supplies. After seven months, hunger forced them to with- draw. The policy of Rome to treat the "foreigner" on equal terms had proved a great success and Rome stood stronger than ever before. This short account of the early history of Rome shows you the enormous difference between the Roman ideal of a healthy state, and that of the ancient world which was embodied in the town of Carthage. The Romans counted upon the cheerful and hearty co-operation between a number of "equal citi- zens." The Carthaginians, following the example of Egypt ROME AND CARTHAGE 97 and western Asia, insisted upon the unreasoning (and there- fore unwilhng) obedience of "Subjects" and when these failed they hired professional soldiers to do their fighting for them. You will now understand why Carthage was bound to fear such a clever and powerful enemy and why the plutocracy of Carthage was only too willing to pick a quarrel that they might destroy the dangerous rival before it was too late. But the Carthaginians, being good business men, knew that A FAST ROMAN WARSHIP it never pays to rush matters. They proposed to the Romans that their respective cities draw two circles on the map and that each town claim one of these circles as her own "sphere of influence" and promise to keep out of the other fellow's cir- cle. The agreement was promptly made and was broken just as promptly when both sides thought it wise to send their armies to Sicily where a rich soil and a bad government in- vited foreign interference. The war which followed (the so-called first Punic War) lasted twenty-four years. It was fought out on the high seas and in the beginning it seemed that the experienced Car- 98 THE STORY OF MANiaND thaginian navy would defeat the newly created Roman fleet. Following their ancient tactics, the Carthaginian ships would either ram the enemy vessels or by a bold attack from the side they would break their oars and would then kill the sailors of the helpless vessel with their arrows and with fire balls. But Roman engineers invented a new craft which carried a board- ing bridge across which the Roman infantrymen stormed the hostile ship. Then there was a sudden end to Carthaginian victories. At the battle of Mylae their fleet was badly defeated. Carthage was obliged to sue for peace, and Sicily became part of the Roman domains. Twenty-three years later new trouble arose. Rome (in quest of copper) had taken the island of Sardinia. Carthage (in quest of silver) thereupon occupied all of southern Spain. This made Carthage a direct neighbour of the Romans. The latter did not like this at all and they ordered their troops to cross the Pyrenees and watch the Carthaginian army of occu- pation. The stage was set for the second outbreak between the two rivals. Once more a Greek colony was the pretext for a war. The Carthaginians were besieging Saguntum on the east coast of Spain. The Saguntians appealed to Rome and Rome, as usual, was willing to help. The Senate promised the help of the Latin armies, but the preparation for this expedition took some time, and meanwhile Saguntum had been taken and had been destroyed. This had been done in direct opposition to the will of Rome. The Senate decided upon war. One Roman army was to cross the African sea and make a landing on Car- thaginian soil. A second division was to keep the Carthaginian armies occupied in Spain to prevent them from rushing to the aid of the home town. It was an excellent plan and every- body expected a great victory. But the Gods had decided otherwise. It was the fall of the year 218 before the birth of Christ and the Roman army which was to attack the Carthaginians in Spain had left Italy. People were eagerly waiting for news of ROME AND CARTHAGE 99 HANNIBAL CROSSES THE ALPS 100 THE STORY OF MANKIND an easy and complete victory when a terrible rumour began to spread through the plain of the Po. Wild mountaineers, their lips trembling with fear, told of hundreds of thousands of brown men accompanied by strange beasts "each one as big as a house," who had suddenly emerged from the clouds of snow which surrounded the old Graian pass through which Hercules, thousands of years before, had driven the oxen of Geryon on his way from Spain to Greece. Soon an endless stream of bedraggled refugees appeared before the gates of Rome, with more complete details. Hannibal, the son of Hamilcar, with fifty thousand soldiers, nine thousand horsemen and thirty- seven fighting elephants, had crossed the Pyrenees. He had defeated the Roman army of Scipio on the banks of the Rhone and he had guided his army safely across the mountain passes of the Alps although it was October and the roads were thickly covered with snow and ice. Then he had joined forces with the Gauls and together they had defeated a second Roman army just before they crossed the Trebia and laid siege to Placentia, the northern terminus of the road which connected Rome with the province of the Alpine districts. The Senate, surprised but calm and energetic as usual, hushed up tlie nevvs of these many defeats and sent two fresh armies to stop the invader. Hannibal managed to surprise these troops on a narrow road along the shores of the Trasi- mene Lake and there he killed all the Roman officers and most of their men. This time there was a panic among the people of Rome, but the Senate kept its nerve. A third army was organised and the command was given to Quintus Fabius Max- imus with full power to act "as was necessary to save the state." Fabius knew that he must be very careful lest all be lost. His raw and untrained men, the last available soldiers, were no match for Hannibal's veterans. He refused to accept battle but forever he followed Hannibal, destroyed everything eat- able, destroyed the roads, attacked small detachments and gen- erally weakened the morale of the Carthaginian troops by a most distressing and annoying form of guerilla warfare. ROME AND CARTHAGE 101 102 THE STORY OF MANKIND Such methods however did not satisfy the fearsome crowds who had found safety behind the walls of Rome. They wanted "action." Something must be done and must be done quickly. A popular hero by the name of Varro, the sort of man who went about the city telling everybody how much better he could do things than slow old Fabius, the "Delayer," was made commander-in-chief by popular acclamation. At the battle of Cannae (216) he suffered the most terrible defeat of Roman history. More than seventy thousand men were killed, Han- nibal was master of all Italy. He marched from one end of the peninsula to the other, proclaiming himself the "deliverer from the yoke of Rome" and asking the different provinces to join him in warfare upon the mother city. Then once more the wisdom of Rome bore noble fruit. With the exceptions of Capua and Syracuse, all Roman cities remained loyal. Hannibal, the deliverer, found himself opposed by the people whose friend he pre- tended to be. He was far away from home and did not like the situation. He sent messengers to Carthage to ask for fresh supplies and new men. Alas, Carthage could not send him either. The Romans with their boarding-bridges, were the mas- ters of the sea. Hannibal must help himself as best he could. He continued to defeat the Roman armies that were sent out against him, but his own numbers were decreasing rapidly and the Italian peasants held aloof from this self-appointed "de- liverer." After many years of uninterrupted victories, Hannibal found himself besieged in the country which he had just con- quered. For a moment, the luck seemed to turn. Hasdrubal, his brother, had defeated the Roman armies in Spain. He had crossed the Alps to come to Hannibal's assistance. He sent messengers to the south to tell of his arrival and ask the other army to meet him in the plain of the Tiber. Unforunately the messengers fell into the hands of the Romans and Hannibal waited in vain for further news until his brother's head, neatly ROME AND CARTHAGE 103 packed in a basket, came rolling into his camp and told him of the fate of the last of the Carthaginian troops. With Hasdrubal out of the way, young Publius Scipio easily reconquered Spain and four years later the Romans were ready for a final attack upon Carthage. Hannibal was called back. He crossed the African Sea and tried to organise the defences of his home-city. In the year 202 at the battle of Zama, the Carthaginians were defeated. Hannibal fled to Tyre. From there he went to Asia Minor to stir up the Syrians and the Macedonians against Rome. He accomplished very little but his activities among these Asiatic powers gave the Romans an excuse to carry their warfare into the territory of the east and annex the greater part of the ^gean world. Driven from one city to an- other, a fugitive without a home, Hannibal at last knew that the end of his ambitious dream had come. His beloved city of Car- thage had been ruined by the war. She had been forced to sign a terrible peace. Her navy had been sunk. She had been forbidden to make war without Roman permission. She had been condemned to pay the Ro- mans millions of dollars for end- less years to come. Life offered no hope of a better future. In the year 190 B.C. Hannibal took poison and killed himself. Forty years later, the Romans forced their last war upon Carthage. Three long years the inhabitants of the old Phoeni- cian colony held out against the power of the new republic. Hunger forced them to surrender. The few men and women who had survived the siege were sold as slaves. The city was set on fire. For two whole weeks the store-houses and the pal- THE DEATH OF HANNIBAL 104 THE STORY OF MANKIND aces and the great arsenal burned. Then a terrible curse was pronounced upon the blackened ruins and the Roman legions returned to Italy to enjoy their victory. For the next thousand years, the Mediterranean remained a European sea. But as soon as the Roman Empire had been destroyed, Asia made another attempt to dominate this great inland sea, as you will learn when I tell you about Mohammed. THE RISE OF ROME HOW ROME HAPPENED The Roman Empire was an accident. No one planned it. It "happened." No famous general or statesman or cut- throat ever got up and said "Friends, Romans, Citizens, we must found an Empire. Follow me and together we shall con- quer all the land from the Gates of Hercules to Mount Tau- rus." Rome produced famous generals and equally distinguished statesmen and cut-throats, and Roman armies fought all over the world. But the Roman empire-making was done without HOW ROME HAPPENED 105 106 THE STORY OF MANKIND a preconceived plan. The average Roman was a very matter- of-fact citizen. He disliked theories about government. When someone began to recite "eastv/ard the course of Roman Em- pire, etc., etc.," he hastily left the forum. He just continued to take more and more land because circumstances forced him to do so. He was not driven by ambition or by greed. Both by nature and inclination he was a farmer and wanted to stay at home. But when he was attacked he was obliged to defend himself and when the enemy happened to cross the sea to ask for aid in a distant country then the patient Roman marched many dreary miles to defeat this dangerous foe and when this had been accomplished, he stayed behind to adminster his newly conquered provinces lest they fall into the hands of wandering Barbarians and become themselves a menace to Roman safety. It sounds rather complicated and yet to the contemporaries it was so very simple, as you shall see in a mo- ment. In the year 203 B.C. Scipio had crossed the African Sea ^ and had carried the war into Africa. Carthage had called Han- nibal back. Badly supported by his mercenaries, Hannibal had been defeated near Zama. The Romans had asked for his surrender and Hannibal had fled to get aid from the kings of Macedonia and Syria, as I told you in my last chapter. The rulers of these two countries (remnants of the Empire of Alexander the Great) just then were contemplating an ex- pedition against Egypt. They hoped to divide the rich Nile valley between themselves. The king of Egypt had heard of this and he had asked Rome to come to his support. The stage was set for a number of highly interesting plots and counter- plots. But the Romans, with their lack of imagination, rang the curtain down before the play had been fairly started. Their legions completely defeated the heavy Greek phalanx which was still used by the Macedonians as their battle forma- tion. That happened in the year 197 B.C. at the battle in the plains of Cynoscephalae or "Dogs' Heads," in central Thessaly. The Romans then marched southward to Attica and in- formed the Greeks that they had come to "deliver the Hellenes THE RISE OF ROME 107 from the Macedonian yoke." The Greeks, having learned nothing in their years of semi-slavery, used their new freedom in a most unfortunate way. All the little city-states once more began to quarrel with each other as they had done in the good old days. The Romans, who had little understanding and less love for these silly bickerings of a race which they rather de- spised, showed great forebearance. But tiring of these endless CIVILIZATION GOES WESTWARD dissensions they lost patience, invaded Greece, burned down Corinth (to "encourage the other Greeks") and sent a Roman governor to Athens to rule this turbulent province. In this way, Macedonia and Greece became buffer states which pro- tected Rome's eastern frontier. Meanwhile right across the Hellespont lay the Kingdom of Syria, and Antiochus III, who ruled that vast land, had shown great eagerness when his distinguished guest. General Han- 108 THE STORY OF MANKIND nibal, explained to him how easy it would be to invade Italy and sack the city of Rome. Lucius Scipio, a brother of Scipio the African fighter who had defeated Hannibal and his Carthaginians at Zama, was sent to Asia Minor. He destroyed the armies of the Syrian king near Magnesia (in the year 190 B.C.) Shortly after- wards, Antiochus was lynched by his own people. Asia Minor became a Roman protectorate and the small City-Republic of Rome was mistress of most of the lands which bordered upon the Mediterranean. \\ ^y HOW THE REPUBLIC OF ROME AFTER CEN- TURIES OF UNREST AND REVOLUTION BE- CAME AN EMPIRE When the Roman armies returned from these many vic- torious campaigns, they were received with great jubilation. Alas and alack ! this sudden glory did not make the country any happier. On the contrary. The endless campaigns had ruined the farmers who had been obliged to do the hard work of Em- pire making. It had placed too much power in the hands of the successful generals (and their private friends) who had used the war as an excuse for wholesale robbery. The old Roman Republic had been proud of the simplicity which had characterised the lives of her famous men. The new Republic felt ashamed of the shabby coats and the high principles which had been fashionable in the days of its grand- fathers. It became a land of rich people ruled by rich people for the benefit of rich people. As such it was doomed to dis- astrous failure, as I shall now tell you. Within less than a century and a half, Rome had become the mistress of practically all the land around the Mediter- ranean. In those early days of history a prisoner of war lost his freedom and became a slave. The Roman regarded war as a very serious business and he showed no mercy to a conquered foe. After the fall of Carthage, the Carthaginian women and children were sold into bondage together with their own slaves. 109 110 THE STORY OF MANKIND And a like fate awaited the obstinate inhabitants of Greece and Macedonia and Spain and Syria when they dared to revolt against the Roman power. Two thousand years ago a slave was merely a piece of machinery. Nowadays a rich man invests his money in fac- tories. The rich people of Rome (senators, generals and war- profiteers) invested theirs in land and in slaves. The land they bought or took in the newly-acquired provinces. The slaves they bought in open market wherever they happened to Jbe cheapest. During most of the third and second centuries before Christ there was a plentiful supply, and as a result the landowners worked their slaves until they dropped dead in their tracks, when they bought new ones at the nearest bargain-coun- ter of Corinthian or Carthaginian captives. And now behold the fate of the f reeborn farmer ! He had done his duty toward Rome and he had fought her battles without complaint. But when he came home after ten, fifteen or twenty years, his lands were covered with weeds and his family had been ruined. But he was a strong man and willing to begin life anew. He sowed and planted and waited for the harvest. He carried his grain to the market together with his cattle and his poultry, to find that the large landowners who worked their estates with slaves could underbid him all along the line. For a couple of years he tried to hold his own. Then he gave up in despair. He left the country and he went to the nearest city. In the city he was as hungry as he had been before on the land. But he shared his misery with thousands of other disinherited beings. They crouched together in filthy hovels in the suburbs of the large cities. They were agt to get sick and die from terrible epidemics. They were all pro- foundly discontented. They had fought for their country and this was their reward. They were always willing to listen to those plausible spell-binders who gather around a public griev- ance like so many hungry vultures, and soon they became a grave menace to the safety of the state. But the class of the newly-rich shrugged its shoulders. "We have our army and our policemen," they argued, "they THE ROMAN EMPIRE 111 will keep the mob in order." And they hid themselves behind the high walls of their pleasant villas and cultivated their gar- dens and read the poems of a certain Homer which a Greek slave had just translated into very pleasing Latin hexameters. In a few families however the old tradition of unselfish service to the Commonwealth continued. Cornelia, the daugh- ter of Scipio Africanus, had been married to a Roman by the name of Gracchus. She had two sons, Tiberius and Gains. When the boys grew up they entered politics and tried to bring about certain much-needed reforms. A census had shown* that most of the land of the Italian peninsula was owned by two thousand noble families. Tiberius Gracchus, having been elected a Tribune, tried to help the freemen. He revived two ancient laws which restricted the number of acres which a sin- gle owner might possess. In this way he hoped to revive the valuable old class of small and independent freeholders. The newly-rich called him a robber and an enemy of the state. There were street riots. A party of thugs was hired to kill the popular Tribune. Tiberius Gracchus was attacked when he entered the assembly and was beaten to death. Ten years later his brother Gains tried the experiment of reforming a nation against the expressed wishes of a strong privileged class. He passed a "poor law" which was meant to help the destitute farmers. Eventually it made the greater part of the Roman citizens into professional beggars. He established colonies of destitute people in distant parts of the empire, but these settlements failed to attract the right sort of people. Before Gains Gracchus could do more harm he too was murdered and his followers were either killed or exiled. The first two reformers had been gentlemen. The two who came after were of a very different stamp. They were pro- fessional soldiers. One was called Marius. The name of the other was Sulla. Both enjoyed a large personal following. Sulla was the leader of the landowners. Marius, the vic- tor in a great battle at the foot of the Alps when the Teu- tons and the Cimbri had been annihilated, was the popular hero of the disinherited freemen. 112 THE STORY OF MANKIND Now it happened in the year 88 B.C. that the Senate of Rome was greatly disturbed by rumours that came from Asia. Mithridates, king of a country along the shores of the Black Sea, and a Greek on his mother's side, had seen the possibility of establishing a second Alexandrian Empire. He began his campaign for world-domination with the murder of all Roman citizens who happened to be in Asia Minor, men, women and children. Such an act, of course, meant war. The Senate equipped an army to march against the King of Pontus and punish him for his crime. But who was to be commander-in- chief? "Sulla," said the Senate, "because he is Consul." "Marius," said the mob, "because he has been Consul five times and because he is the champion of our rights." Possession is nine points of the law. Sulla happened to be in actual command of the army. He went west to defeat Mithridates and Marius fled to Africa. There he waited until he heard that Sulla had crossed into Asia. He then re- turned to Italy, gathered a motley crew of malcontents, marched on Rome and entered the city with his professional highwaymen, spent five days and five nights, slaughtering the enemies of the Senatorial party, got himself elected Consul and promptly died from the excitement of the last fortnight. There followed four years of disorder. Then Sulla, having defeated Mithridates, announced that he was ready to return to Rome and settle a few old scores of his own. He was as good as his word. For weeks his soldiers were busy executing those of their fellow citizens who were suspected of democratic sympathies. One day they got hold of a young fellow who had been often seen in the company of Marius. They were going to hang him when some one interfered. "The boy is too young," he said, and they let him go. His name was Julius Csesar. You shall meet him again on the next page. As for Sulla, he became "Dictator," which meant sole and supreme ruler of all the Roman possessions. He ruled Rome for four years, and he died quietly in his bed, having spent the last year of his life tenderly raising his cabbages, as was the THE ROMAN EMPIRE US custom of so many Romans who had spent a lifetime kilHng their fellow-men. But conditions did not grow better. On the contrary, they grew worse. Another general, Gnasus Pomj^eius, or Pompey, a close friend of Sulla, went east to renew the war against the ever troublesome Mithridates. He drove that energetic poten- tate into the mountains where Mithridates took poison and killed himself, well knowing what fate awaited him as a Roman captive. Next he re-established the authority of Rome over Syria, destroyed Jerusalem, roamed through western Asia, trying to revive the myth of Alexander the Great, and at last (in the year 62) returned to Rome with a dozen ship-loads of defeated Kings and Princes and Generals, all of whom were forced to march in the triumphal procession of this enormously popular Roman who presented his city with the sum of forty million dollars in plunder. It was necessary that the government of Rome be placed in the hands of a strong man. Only a few months before, the town had almost fallen into the hands of a good-for-nothing young aristocrat by the name of Catiline, who had gambled away his money and hoped to reimburse himself for his losses by a little plundering. Cicero, a public-spirited lawyer, had dis- covered the plot, had warned the Senate, and had forced Cati- line to flee. But there were other young men with similar am- bitions and it was no time for idle talk. Pompey organised a triumvirate which was to take charge of affairs. He became the leader of this Vigilante Commit- tee. Gaius Julius Csesar, who had made a reputation for him- self as governor of Spain, was the second in command. The third was an indifferent sort of person by the name of Crassus. He had been elected because he was incrediblj^ rich, having been a successful contractor of war supplies. He soon went upon an expedition against the Parthians and was killed. As for Caesar, who was by far the ablest of the three, he decided that he needed a little more military glory to become a popular hero. He crossed the Alps and conquered that part of the world which is now called France. Then he hammered 114 THE STORY OF MANKIND a solid wooden bridge across the Rhine and invaded the land of the wild Teutons. Finally he took ship and visited England. Heaven knows where he might have ended if he had not been forced to return to Italy. Pompey, so he was informed, had been appointed dictator for life. This of course meant that Cffisar was to be placed on the list of the "retired officers," and the idea did not appeal to him. He remembered that he had begun life as a follower of Marius. He decided to teach the C^SAR GOES WEST Senators and their "dictator" another lesson. He crossed the Rubicon River which separated the province of Cis-alpine Gaul from Italy. Everywhere he was received as the "friend of the people." Without difficulty Csesar entered Rome and Pompey fled to Greece. Cassar followed him and defeated his followers near Pharsalus. Pompey sailed across the Mediterranean and escaped to Egypt. When he landed he was murdered by order of young king Ptolemy. A few days later Caesar arrived. He found himself caught in a trap. Both the Egyptians and THE ROMAN EMPIRE 115 the Roman garrison which had remained faithful to Pompey, attacked his camp. Fortune was with Caesar. He succeeded in setting fire to the Egyptian fleet. Incidentally the sparks of the burning vessels fell on the roof of the famous library of Alexandria (which was just off the water front,) and destroyed it. Next he attacked the Egyptian army, drove the soldiers into the Nile, drowned Ptolemy, and established a new government under Cleopatra, the sister of the late king. Just then word reached him that Pharnaces, the son and heir of Mithridates, had gone on the war-path. Cssar marched northward, de- feated Pharnaces in a war which lasted five days, sent word of his victory to Rome in the famous sentence "veni, vidi, vici," which is Latin for "I came, I saw, I conquered," and returned to Egypt where he fell desperately in love with Cleopatra, who followed him to Rome when he returned to take charge of the government, in the year 46. He marched at the head of not less than four different victory-parades, having won four dif- ferent campaigns. Then Csesar appeared in the Senate to report upon his ad- ventures, and the grateful Senate made him "dictator" for ten years. It was a fatal step. The new dictator made serious attempts to reform the Roman state. He made it possible for freemen to become members of the Senate. He conferred the rights of citizenship upon distant communities as had been done in the early days of Roman history. He permitted "foreigners" to exercise in- fluence upon the government. He reformed the administra- tion of the distant provinces which certain aristocratic families had come to regard as their private possessions. In short he did many things for the good of the majority of the people but which made him thoroughly unpopular with the most powerful men in the state. Half a hundred young aristocrats formed a plot "to save the Republic." On the Ides of March (the fif- teenth of March according to that new calendar which Csesar had brought with him from Egypt) Casar was murdered when he entered the Senate. Once more Rome was without a master. 116 THE STORY OF MANKIND THE GREAT ROMAN EMPIRE THE ROMAN EMPIRE 117 There were two men who tried to continue the tradition of Csesar's glory. One was Antony, his former secretary. The other was Octavian, Csesar's grand-nephew and heir to his es- tate. Octavian remained in Rome, but Antony went to Egypt to be near Cleopatra with whom he too had fallen in love, as seems to have been the habit of Roman generals. A war broke out between the two. In the battle of Ac- tium, Octavian defeated Antony. Antony killed himself and Cleopatra was left alone to face the enemy. She tried very hard to make Octavian her third Roman conquest. When she saw that she could make no impression upon this very proud aristocrat, she killed herself, and Egypt became a Roman prov- ince. As for Octavian, he was a very wise young man and he did not repeat the mistake of his famous uncle. He knew how people will shy at words. He was very modest in his demands when he returned to Rome. He did not want to be a "dicta- tor." He would be entirely satisfied with the title of "the Hon- ourable." But when the Senate, a few years later, addressed him as Augustus — the Illustrious — he did not object and a few years later the man in the street called him Ctesar, or Kaiser, while the soldiers, accustomed to regard Octavian as their Com- mander-in-chief referred to him as the Chief, the Imperator or Emperor. The Repubhc had become an Empire, but the aver- age Roman was hardly aware of the fact. In 14 A.D. his position as the Absolute Ruler of the Roman people had become so well established that he was made an object of that divine worship which hitherto had been re- served for the Gods. And his successors were true "Emper- ors" — the absolute rulers of the greatest empire the world had ever seen. If the truth be told, the average citizen was sick and tired of anarchy and disorder. He did not care who ruled him pro- vided the new master gave him a chance to live quietly and without the noise of eternal street riots. Octavian assured his subjects forty years of peace. He had no desire to extend the frontiers of his domains. In the year 9 a.d. he had contem- 118 THE STORY OF MANKIND plated an invasion of the northwestern wilderness which was inhabited by the Teutons. But Varrus, his general, had been killed with all his men in the Teutoburg Woods, and after that the Romans made no further attempts to civilise these wild people. They concentrated their efforts upon the gigantic problem of internal reform. But it was too late to do much good. Two centuries of revolution and foreign war had repeatedly killed the best men among the younger generations. It had ruined the class of the free farmers. It had introduced slave laboj, against which no freeman could hope to compete. It had turned the cities into beehives inhabited by pauperized and unhealthy mobs of runaway peasants. It had created a large bureaucracy — petty officials who were underpaid and who were forced to take graft in order to buy bread and clothing for their families. Worst of all, it had accustomed people to vio- lence, to blood-shed, to a barbarous pleasure in the pain and suffering of others. Outwardly, the Roman state during the first century of our era was a magnificent political structure, so large that Alex- ander's empire became one of its minor provinces. Underneath this glory there lived millions upon millions of poor and tired human beings, toiling like ants who have built a nest under- neath a heavy stone. They worked for the benefit of some one else. They shared their food with the animals of the fields. They lived in stables. They died without hope. It was the seven hundred and fiftj^-third year since the founding of Rome. Gains Julius Casar Octavianus Augustus was living in the palace of the Palatine Hill, busily engaged upon the task of ruling his empire. In a little village of distant Syria, Mary, the wife of Joseph the Carpenter, was tending her little boy, born in a stable of Bethlehem. This is a strange world. Before long, the palace and the stable were to meet in open combat. And-lhe stable was_to emerge victorious. JOSHUA OF NAZARETH THE STORY OF JOSHUA OF NAZARETH, WHOM THE GREEKS CALLED JESUS In the autumn of the year of the city 783 (which would be 62 A.D., in our way of counting time) ^sculapius Cultellus, a Roman physician, wrote to his nephew who was with the army in Syria as follows: My dear Nephew, A few days ago I was called in to prescribe for a sick man named Paul. He appeared to be a Roman citizen of Jewish parentage, well educated and of agreeable manners. I had been told that he was here in connection with a law-suit, an ap- peal from one of our provincial courts, C^esarea or some such place in the eastern Mediterranean. He had been described to me as a "wild and violent" fellow who had been making speeches against the People and against the Law. I found him very intelligent and of great honesty. A friend of mine who used to be with the army in Asia Minor tells me that he heard something about him in Ephesus where he was preaching sermons about a strange new God. I asked my patient if this were true and whether he had told the people to rebel against the will of our beloved Emperor. Paul answered me that the Kingdom of which he had spoken was not of this world and he added many strange utterances which I did not understand, but which were probably due to his fever. 119 120 THE STORY OF MANKIND His personality made a great impression upon me and I was sorry to hear that he was killed on the Ostian Road a few days ago. Therefore I am writing this letter to you. When next you visit Jerusalem, I want you to find out something about my friend Paul and the strange Jewish prophet, who seems to have been his teacher. Our slaves are getting much excited about this so-called Messiah, and a few of them, who openly talked of the new kingdom (whatever that means) have been crucified. I would like to know the truth about all these rumours and I am Your devoted Uncle, iEsCULAPIUS CULTELLUS. Six weeks later, Gladius Ensa, the nephew, a captain of the VII Gallic Infantry, answered as follows: My dear Uncle, I received your letter and I have obeyed your instructions. Two weeks ago our brigade was sent to Jerusalem. There have been several revolutions during the last century and there is not much left of the old city. We have been here now for a month and to-morrow we shall continue our march to Petra, where there has been trouble with some of the Arab tribes. I shall use this evening to answer your questions, but pray do not expect a detailed repoi-t. I have talked with most of the older men in this city but few have been able to give me any definite information. A few days ago a peddler came to the camp. I bought some of his olives and I asked him whether he had ever heard of the famous Messiah who was killed when he was young. He said that he remembered it very clearly, because his father had taken him to Golgotha (a hill just outside the city) to see the execution, and to show him what became of the enemies of the laws of the people of Judasa. He gave me the address of one Joseph, who had been a personal friend of the Messiah and told me that I had better go and see him if I wanted to know more. JOSHUA OF NAZARETH 121 This morning I went to call on Joseph. He was quite an old man. He had been a fisherman on one of the fresh-water lakes. His memory was clear, and from him at last I got a fairly definite account of what had happened during the trou- blesome days before I was born. Tiberius, our great and glorious emperor, was on the throne, and an officer of the name of Pontius Pilatus was governor of THE HOLY LAND Judaea and Samaria. Joseph knew little about this Pilatus. He seemed to have been an honest enough official who left a decent reputation as procurator of the province. In the year 755 or 756 (Joseph had forgotten when) Pilatus was called to Jerusalem on account of a riot. A certain young man (the son of a carpenter of Nazareth) was said to be planning a revolution against the Roman government. Strangely enough our own intelligence officers, who are usually well informed. m THE STORY OF MANKIND appear to have heard nothing about it, and when they inves- tigated the matter they reported that the carpenter was an excellent citizen and that there was no reason to proceed against him. But the old-fashioned leaders of the Jewish faith, accord- ing to Joseph, were much upset. They greatly disliked his popularity with the masses of the poorer Hebrews. The "Nazarene" (so they told Pilatus) had publicly claimed that a Greek or a Roman or even a Philistine, who tried to live a de- cent and honourable life, was quite as good a Jew who spent his days studying the ancient laws of Moses. Pilatus does not seem to have been impressed by this argument, but when the crowds around the temple threatened to lynch Jesus, and kill all his followers, he decided to take the carpenter into custody to save his life. He does not appear to have understood the real nature of the quarrel. Whenever he asked the Jewish priests to explain their grievances, they shouted "heresy" and "treason" and got terribly excited. Finally, so Joseph told me, Pilatus sent for Joshua (that was the name of the Nazarene, but the Greeks who live in this part of the world always refer to him as Jesus ) to examine him personally. He talked to him for several hours. He asked him about the "dangerous doctrines" which he was said to have preached on the shores of the sea of Galilee. But Jesus answered that he never referred to politics. He was not so much interested in the bodies of men as in Man's soul. He wanted all people to regard their neighbours as their brothers and to love one single God, who was the father of all living beings. Pilatus, who seems to have been well versed in the doctrines of the Stoics and the other Greek philosophers, does not ap- pear to have discovered an5i;hing seditious in the talk of Jesus. According to my informant he made another attempt to save the life of the kindly prophet. He kept putting the execution off. Meanwhile the Jewish people, lashed into fury by their priests, got frantic with rage. There had been many riots in Jerusalem before this and there were only a few Roman sol- diers within calling distance. Reports were being sent to the JOSHUA OF NAZARETH 123 Roman authorities in Csesarea that Pilatus had "fallen a vic- tim to the teachings of the Nazarene." Petitions were being circulated all through the city to have Pilatus recalled, because he was an enemy of the Emperor. You know that our gov- ernors have strict instructions to avoid an open break with their foreign subjects. To save the country from civil war, Pilatus finally sacrificed his prisoner, Joshua, who behaved with great dignity and who forgave all those who hated him. He was crucified amidst the howls and the laughter of the Jerusalem mob. That is what Joseph told me, with tears running down his old cheeks. I gave him a gold piece when I left him, but he refused it and asked me to hand it to one poorer than himself. I also asked him a few questions about your friend Paul. Pie had known him slightly. He seems to have been a tent maker who gave up his profession that he might preach the words of a loving and forgiving God, who was so very different from that Jehovah of whom the Jewish priests are telling us all the time. Afterwards, Paul appears to have travelled much in Asia Minor and in Greece, telling the slaves that they were all children of one loving Father and that happiness awaits all, both rich and poor, who have tried to live honest lives and have done good to those who were suffering and miserable. I hope that I have answered your questions to your satis- faction. The whole story seems very harmless to me as far as the safety of the state is concerned. But then, we Romans never have been able to understand the people of this province. I am sorry that they have killed your friend Paul. I wish that I were at home again, and I am, as ever. Your dutiful nephew, Gladius Ensa. THE FALL OF ROME THE TWILIGHT OF ROME The text-books of ancient History give the date 476 as the jT^ear in which Rome fell, because in that year the last emperor was driven off his throne. But Rome, which was not built in a day, took a long time falling. The process was so slow and so gradual that most Romans did not realise how their old world was coming to an end. They complained about the un- rest of the times — they grumbled about the high prices of food and about the low wages of the workmen — ^they cursed the profiteers who had a monopoly of the grain and the wool and the gold coin. Occasionally they rebelled against an unusually rapacious governor. But the majority of the people during the first four centuries of our era ate and drank (whatever their purse allowed them to buy) and hated or loved (according to their nature) and went to the theatre (whenever there was a free show of fighting gladiators) or starved in the slums of the big cities, utterly ignorant of the fact that their empire had outlived its usefulness and was doomed to perish. How could they realise the threatened danger? Rome made a fine showing of outward glory. Well-paved roads con- nected the diiFerent provinces, the imperial police were active and showed little tenderness for highwaymen. The frontier was closely guarded against the savage tribes who seemed to be occupying the waste lands of northern Europe. The whole world was paying tribute to the mighty city of Rome, and a 124 THE FALL OF ROME 125 score of able men were working day and night to undo the mistakes of the past and bring about a return to the happier conditions of the early Republic. But the underlying causes of the decay of the State, of which I have told you in a former chapter, had not been removed and reform therefore was impossible. Rome was, first and last and all the time, a city-state as Athens and Corinth had been city-states in ancient Hellas. It had been able to dominate the Italian peninsula. But Rome as the ruler of the entire civilised world was a political impos- sibility and could not endure. Her young men were killed in her endless wars. Her farmers were ruined by long military service and by taxation. They either became professional beggars or hired themselves out to rich landowners who gave them board and lodging in exchange for their services and made them "serfs," those unfortunate human beings who are neither slaves nor freemen, but who have become part of the soil upon which they work, like so many cows, and the trees. The Empire, the State, had become everything. The com- mon citizen had dwindled down to less than nothing. As for the slaves, they had heard the words that were spoken by Paul. They had accepted the message of the humble carpenter of Nazareth. They did not rebel against their masters. On the contrary, they had been taught to be meek and they obeyed their superiors. But they had lost all interest in the affairs of this world which had proved such a miserable place of abode. They were willing to fight the good fight that they might enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. But they were not willing to engage in warfare for the benefit of an ambitious emperor who aspired to glory by way of a foreign campaign in the land of the Parthians or the Numidians or the Scots. And so conditions grew worse as the centuries went by. The first Emperors had continued the tradition of "leader- ship" which had given the old tribal chieftains such a hold upon their subjects. But the Emperors of the second and third centuries were Barrack-Emperors,' professional soldiers, who existed by the grace of their body-guards, the so-called Prse- 126 THE STORY OF IVIANKIND torians. They succeeded each other with terrifying rapidity, murdering their way into the palace and being murdered out of it as soon as their successors had become rich enough to bribe the guards into a new rebellion. Meanwhile the barbarians were hammering at the gates of the northern frontier. As there were no longer any native Roman armies to stop their progress, foreign mercenaries had to be hired to fight the invader. As the foreign soldier hap- pened to be of the same blood as his supposed enemy, he was WHEN THE BARBARIANS GOT THROUGH WITH A ROMAN CITY apt to be quite lenient when he engaged in battle. Finally, by way of experiment, a few tribes were allowed to settle within the confines of the Empire. Others followed. Soon these tribes complained bitterly of the greedy Roman tax- gatherers, who took away their last penny. When they got no redress they marched to Rome and loudly demanded that they be heard. This made Rome very uncomfortable as an Imperial resi- dence. Constantine (who ruled from 323 to 337) looked for a new capital. He chose Byzantium, the gate-way for the commerce between Europe and Asia. The city was renamed ROME THE FALL OF ROME 127 Constantinople, and the court moved eastward. When Con- stantine died, his two sons, for the sake of a more efficient administration, divided the Empire between them. The elder lived in Rome and ruled in the west. The younger stayed in Constantinople and was master of the east. Then came the fourth century and the terrible visitation of the Huns, those mysterious Asiatic horsemen who for more than two centuries maintained themselves in Northern Europe and continued their career of bloodshed until they were de- feated near Chalons-sur-Marne in France in the year 451. As soon as the Huns had reached the Danube they had begun to press hard upon the Goths. The Goths, in order to save themselves, were thereupon obliged to invade Rome. The Emperor Valens tried to stop them, but was killed near Adrianople in the year 378. Twenty-two years later, under their king, Alaric, these same West Goths marched westward and attacked Rome. They did not plunder, and destroyed only a few palaces. Next came the Vandals, and showed less respect for the venerable traditions of the city. Then the Burgundians. Then the East Goths. Then the Alemanni. Then the Franks. There was no end to the invasions. Rome at last was at the mercy of every ambitious highway robber who could gather a few followers. In the year 402 the Emperor fled to Ravenna, which was a sea-port and strongly fortified, and there, in the year 475, Odoacer, comimander of a regiment of the German mercen- aries, who wanted the farms of Italy to be divided among them- selves, gently but effectively pushed Romulus Augustulus, the last of the emperors who ruled the western division, from his throne, and proclaimed himself Patriarch or ruler of Rome. The eastern Emperor, who was very busy with his own affairs, recognised him, and for ten years Odoacer ruled what was left of the western provinces. A few years later, Theodoric, King of the East Goths, invaded the newly formed Patriciat, took Ravenna, murdered Odoacer at his own dinner table, and established a Gothic 128 THE STORY OF MANKIND THE FALL OF ROME 129 Kingdom amidst the ruins of the eastern part of the Empire. This Patriciate state did not last long. In the sixth century a motley crowd of Longobards and Saxons and Slavs and Avars invaded Italy, destroyed the Gothic kingdom, and established a new state of which Pavia became the capital. Then at last the imperial city sank into a state of utter neglect and despair. The ancient palaces had been plundered time and again. The schools had been burned down. The teachers had been stai^ved to death. The rich people had been thrown out of their villas which were now inhabited by evil- smelling and hairy barbarians. The roads had fallen into decay. The old bridges were gone and commerce had come to a standstill. Civilisation — the product of thousands of years of patient labor on the part of Egyptians and Babylonians and Greeks and Romans, which had lifted man high above the most daring dreams of his earliest ancestors, threatened to perish from the western continent. It is true that in the far east, Constantinople continued to be the centre of an Empire for another thousand years. But it hardly counted as a part of the European continent. Its interests lay in the east. It began to forget its western origin. Gradually the Roman language was given up for the Greek. The Roman alphabet was discarded and Roman law was writ- ten in Greek characters and explained by Greek judges. The Emperor became an Asiatic despot, worshipped as the god-like kings of Thebes had been worshipped in the valley of the Nile, three thousand years before. When missionaries of the Byzantine church looked for fresh fields of activity, they went eastward and carried the civilisation of Byzantium into the vast wilderness of Russia. As for the west, it was left to the mercies of the Barbarians. For twelve generations, murder, war, arson, plundering were the order of the day. One thing — and one thing alone — saved Europe from complete destruction, from a return to the days of cave-men and the hyena. This was the church — the flock of humble men and women 130 THE STORY OF MANKIND who for many centuries had confessed themselves the fol- lowers of Jesus, the carpenter of Nazareth, who had been killed that the mighty Roman Empire might be saved the trouble of a street-riot in a little city somewhere along the Syrian frontier. HOW ROME BECAME THE CENTRE OF THE CHRISTIAN WORLD The average intelligent Roman who lived under the Em- pire had taken very little interest in the gods of his fathers. A few times a year he went to the temple, but merely as a matter of custom. He looked on patiently when the people celebrated a religious festival with a solemn procession. But he regarded the worship of Jupiter and Minerva and Neptune as something rather childish, a survival from the crude days of the early republic and not a fit subject of study for a man who had mastered the works of the Stoics and the Epicureans and the other great philosophers of Athens. This attitude made the Roman a very tolerant man. The government insisted that all people, Romans, foreigners, Greeks, Babylonians, Jews, should pay a certain outward re- spect to the image of the Emperor which was supposed to stand in every temple, just as a picture of the President of the United States is apt to hang in an American Post Office. But this was a formality without any deeper meaning. Generally speaking everybody could honour, revere and adore whatever gods he pleased, and as a result, Rome was filled with all sorts of queer httle temples and synagogues, dedicated to the worship of Egyptian and African and Asiatic divinities. When the first disciples of Jesus reached Rome and began to preach their new doctrine of a universal brotherhood of man, 131 132 THE STORY OF MANKIND nobody objected. The man in the street stopped and Hstened. Home, the capital of the world, had always been full of wander- ing preachers, each proclaiming his own "mystery." Most of the self-appointed priests appealed to the senses — promised golden rewards and endless pleasure to the followers of their own particular god. Soon the crowd in the street noticed that the so-called Christians (the followers of the Christ or "anointed") spoke a very different language. They did not appear to be impressed by great riches or a noble position. They extolled the beauties of poverty and humility and meek- ness. These were not exactly the virtues which had made Rome the mistress of the world. It was rather interesting to listen to a "mystery" which told people in the hey-day of their glory that their worldly success could not possibly bring them lasting happiness. Besides, the preachers of the Christian mystery told dread- ful stories of the fate that awaited those who refused to listen to the words of the true God. It was never wise to take chances. Of course the old Roman gods still existed, but were they strong enough to protect their friends against the powers of this new deity who had been brought to Europe from distant Asia? People began to have doubts. They returned to hsten to further explanations of the new creed. After a while they began to meet the men and women who preached the words of Jesus. They found them very different from the average Roman priests. They were all dreadfully poor. They were kind to slaves and to animals. They did not try to gain riches, but gave away whatever they had. The example of their un- selfish lives forced many Romans to forsake the old religion. They joined the small communities of Christians who met in the back rooms of private houses or somewhere in an open field, and the temples were deserted. This went on year after year and the number of Christians continued to increase. Presbyters or priests (the original Greek meant "elder") were elected to guard the interests of the small churches. A bishop was made the head of all the communities within a single province. Peter, who had fol- RISE OF THE CHURCH 133 lowed Paul to Rome, was the first Bishop of Rome. In due time his successors (who were addressed as Father or Papa) came to be known as Popes. The church became a powerful institution within the Em- pire. The Christian doctrines appealed to those who despaired of this world. They also attracted manj^ strong men who found it impossible to make a career under the Imperial gov- ((liiii,|ii(nUit>iiuu-iuu